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nanowrimo · 3 years

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5 Tips for Fast Drafting from a New York Times Bestselling Author

NaNoWriMo is basically an exercise in fast drafting: getting as much of the first draft of the story as you can on the page as quickly as possible. Today, bestselling author J. Elle is here to share some pro tips for fast drafting: My first middle grade novel took me nine days to write.

The first draft was about 40,000 words or so. And yes, it needed to be revised before it sold to a publisher. But the meat of the story was on the page in just over a week’s time. I’d never drafted anything quite that fast before. Within a single month I’d written an entire novel, revised it a couple times and readied it for sale. A few months later that novel sold at auction and will be on shelves May 2022.

I still look back on this feat with a bit of shock and awe. To date I’ve sold five novels to major publishers, two young adult, two middle grade and one non fiction and my experience fast drafting has forever altered the way I approach writing. I should mention, fast drafting isn’t for everyone. Writing is such a personal thing and each storyteller has their own process, but in the event getting the first draft out is the biggest hurdle for you, like it is for me, I’m going to share five tips for knocking out that first draft in record time.

1. Start with a SHORT story pitch.

Pitching a story in a few words is tough. But it’s a worthy effort and the best use of your time before you get any words on the page. Why? Because it helps you hone in on the core of your story and its hook. A good short pitch involves the character, their dilemma, and a hint of the stakes. In October of 2018 I pitched my YA debut novel in a tweet which then blew up. Not many words can fit in a tweet, but by choosing the right set of words, I was able to convey the heart of my story and it really resonated. (From that tweet, I signed with a literary agent and sold my debut novel to a Big 5 publisher in a six-figure-deal.) The biggest favor you can do for yourself is understand the story—its essence, its core—you’re trying to tell before you start drafting. And that’s hard. But the more you play around with creating a short pitch, you’ll begin to see a clear snapshot of what your book is going to be about. That’s your jumping off point.

2. Expand your pitch into tent pole beats.

From your short pitch, spend some time deciding on what your major beats are. Now, yes this is a bit like outlining. And for you pantsers out there, I empathize with you. I was a pantser and still am in many ways. But I still do this step because this step ultimately saves me time. The beauty of fast drafting is that you know what you need to do when you sit down to type. So a lot of these steps are about doing pre-work so that when you sit down to type you’re not spinning your wheels to figure out what to type. Instead you’ll have a clear goal and you’ll be ready to execute it. Also, note that the goal isn’t to perfect each of these steps, but instead to try to do each step, to the best of your ability, and in a way that makes sense.

I could write an entire piece on beat sheeting novels (which I love and do for all my books), but for the purposes here, I’ve organized the main things you want to know below in a series of questions. Simply answer each, make a chart if you like that sort of thing, and once you have each question filled out in a way that logically makes sense, move on to the next step. (NOTE: It’s a good idea to get feedback on this step if you have critique partners and fellow writers you trust.)

Opening Scene - Who is the character before the world changes?

Inciting Incident - What happens that forces them to make a choice, changing their lives forever? What are they choosing between?

“A” Plot - What is that choice they make? What are they pursuing or working toward? Finding information? Going on a quest? Uncovering the truth behind a murder?

Stakes - What are the stakes of the “A” plot? What’s at risk if they fail to accomplish whatever they’re pursuing? It should be something that personally affects them or someone / something they care about.

“B” Plot / Character - Who or what is the theme of the story? What character in your story is going to embody that theme and play a key role in helping the main character change?

Midpoint - what happens in the middle of the book to change the character’s direction. Usually it’s some bit of new information or they realize things are not as they seem.

Stakes Raise - How do the stakes (what’s at risk if they fail) raise after the middle of the book?

Character Arc - what does your character believe about the world in the beginning of the book that by the book’s end they will no longer believe? (An extension of this question is: what things can happen in this character’s life to facilitate them incrementally learning this big truth? If you don’t know this question right off, that’s okay. But this is a question you want to go back to every now and again, even after you finish the first draft, to ensure your character is actively involved in a plot that is resulting in their change.)

Failure - How will your character fail big? This happens at about the 75% point of the book and it's the final moment of failure, usually, before they pick themselves up off the ground (figuratively or literally) and learn the lesson they’ve needed to learn. There forward they act on their new belief to the end of the book, demonstrating how they’re changed.

If you’d like a more in depth look at how to beat sheet a novel, I strongly suggest reading Jessica Brody’s Save The Cat Writes A Novel.

3. Flesh out your beats into a detailed synopsis.

Now the fun part! This step is the most helpful thing you can do to enable yourself to fast draft.

Write a mini version of your story, also known as a detailed synopsis. The key to writing synopses is not to worry about the voice, but instead what happens. Try to convey what happens and its impact on the character to show how the story moves from tent pole moment to tent pole moment (per the step above). This takes some trial and error and you may get annoyed with yourself because it’s not as easy as it seems. But, I’ve seen that if you can write a compelling and cohesive synopsis, the draft that you execute will be far stronger and more efficiently executed.

Definitely get beta feedback on your synopsis from writing friends you trust. It’s worth going over this a few times to get it right. In terms of length, aim for 3-4 pages for a middle grade novel and 5-10 pages for a young adult or adult novel. These are just general guidelines. My latest YA novel required a fifteen page synopsis and I am very glad I did it because it conveys the tone, arc, and plot of the novel and the main plot threads quite well, which allowed me to draft the first 23,000 words of the story in five days.

4. Summarize each scene.

(Note: a chapter can have more than one scene.)

Okay, we’re getting really close to writing! Now that you have a mini version of your story, consider how you will break it up into scenes. This doesn't need to be perfect, but spend some time figuring how to stretch your synopsis into a full novel. Give each scene a short summary. Aim for a few sentences, no more than a paragraph, just so you know what needs to happen in that scene (or scenes). Do not skip this step. I repeat, do not skip this step. This step allows you to sit down and execute the scene without figuring out what to write. The “figuring out” part is where a lot of writers slow down. Do that in the summaries so when it’s time to draft you are ready to execute, not sort out details.

5. Write with a goal in mind.

Plan your writing days. I’m not talking anything extensive here. Just grab your phone calendar or a post-it note and write down which days you want to do which scenes. Then on writing day re-read that summary and execute it. If you’ve done all the pre-work the words will fly from your fingers. Don’t worry about grammar, typos, reading back what you did. Insert fillers such as, “TITLE” or “NAME” for details you haven’t worked out yet. Just get the scene that you’ve summarized out. The goal is to finish the draft. After that is when you make sure it all works together through revisions and fill in the details. Right now the goal is finishing the draft. It literally just needs to exist!

If you’ve done all five steps, pat yourself on the back because congrats, you’re ready to fast draft! Don’t hesitate to tag me on socials if you try this method out and it works for you. I’d love to hear how it goes!

J.Elle is the New York Times bestselling author of Wings of Ebony. Elle has a Bachelor’s of journalism and an MA in educational administration and human development. She grew up in Texas, but has lived all over, from coast to coast which she credits as inspiration for her writing. These days the former educator can be found mentoring aspiring authors, binging reality TV, loving on her three littles, or cooking up something true to her Louisiana roots.

Website: WingsOfEbony.com

Twitter: @AuthorJ_Elle

Instagram: @AuthorJ.Elle

TikTok: @authorjelle

#nanowrimo #writing #amwriting #writing advice #first draft #nano prep #camp nanowrimo #by nano guest #j. elle

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rigelmejo · 3 years

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April Progress Update, and May Goals:

*bear with me this is gonna get long.

I’m going to first just look at April goals and see if I did them, then afterward summarize everything I did this month (cause it was a lot more than I planned ToT)

Chinese study plan from April:

1. Read anything

Well, I did read. However my goal to read hanshe to chapter 80 and Zhenhun to the end of the sundial arc never happened. I did read a lot though. I ended up focusing mainly on extensive reading.

Chinese chapters read: 62 (I counted graded readers/小王子 as 1 chapter for every two that I read, but this number is probably still inflated... compared to my normal 20-pleco page chapters I probably read 31-40 of those-kind-of-chapters length wise).

Chinese stories finished: 4 (Pleco Graded Reader Butterfly Lovers, Chinese Short Stories, Mandarin Companion Journey to the Center of the Earth, 小王子 - you can tell this is where my attention went this month).

Chinese Listening Reading Method chapters done: 14.5 (4.5 Silent Reading, 2 Chapters of A History of Humankind, 1 chapter hp, 1 chapter Alice in Wonderland, iffy but like 3 chapters 小王子, iffy but like 4 chapters of the Xiao Mao cat story - I should note that for Silent Reading, 小王子, Xiao Mao I only looked at the chinese mostly so more step 2, and for the others I did step 3 as recommended). Also I realize... I should probably count this with hours instead of chapters, because hours are where the original poster about LR mentioned when milestones are hit. However, being realistic, I do not do things in hour segments so I’m not sure any tracking will be as easy as this way...

A cool thing potentially about L R Method? I found some resources recently that will make this a lot easier (Bidiread is a site that can make parallel texts for you, which made silent reading MUCH easier since the audio doesn’t perfectly match so you NEED to see the chinese even if only doing step 3, to make sure you can keep track of where you are in the text when the audio skips paragraphs). I also found Francais Par Le Methode Nature as videos on youtube with audio and the text visible (is that not simply L R method step 2 but its all comprehensible, i love that book). And I found a few files on youtube of audiobooks with english audio and chinese/english parallel text on screen (a bit backwards in process but i’m curious to test it), one youtube channel who does chinese audio with parallel texts on screen (phenomenal!), and I remembered the site bilinguis exists which is excellent for French if you wanna try L R Method (it has a few french audios with the parallel texts). Also in the case of A History of Humankind - the audiobook for once is very closely synced to the actual chapter start/ends, so it was just easier to do L R Method with.

2. Listen to Chinese Spoonfed Audio, shadowing when I can

YES I did this! I was on 11 last month, now I’m on 15. (so 4 audio this month) Yes I realize that wasn’t a lot of improvement T-T. What can I say I am not very good at being disciplined. However I did learn something interesting this month ABOUT listening to these so I think I might do it more - I listened to some in the background while playing games, then later listened to them again (also why I only got through 4 - I was replaying audios maybe 2 times). And when I listened the second time I could understand nearly all, whereas obviously when playing my game I only caught parts of it. So I suppose what this showed me is partially listening and partially focusing still may have some benefit in helping to learn the info - and well obviously its easier to make time to play audio when u don’t need to focus 100% on it.

I also did some other misc listening to random stuff without any plan: 6? audio 1 of DeFrancis Beginner Chinese Reader, 1 audio of FSI Chinese, 2 condensed audios of Guardian (which was so cool?? also so cool i can follow along so well now??), 1 dracula chapter audio (don’t even ask i don’t know either), tian ya ke audio drama ep 1.

Chinese show episodes watched: 28 (You can see here is where my time went listening wise lol - Two Souls in One is GOOD u might wanna check it out, is all I’m saying, especially if the taiwan drama Bromance was ur thing, or the anime Ouran Host Club, or even Bureau of Transformer to a degree. I watched up to ep 25 and once its all aired to the finale I’m gonna finish it.

Optional going through my hanzi book: I burned out on this, but it was a good use of my time when I felt like writing. I only wrote/studied maybe 30 hanzi, and maybe 50 hanzi+radicals in my Radical-Specific hanzi book. If I continue, I think my goal will be to just continue the Radical-book to completion. Realistically, longer term, I need to go through the freaking Alan Hoenig’s Chinese Character’s book just to get the hanzi and their rough meaning to stick in my head (and learn the pronunciations through well context and vocab how I normally do). Right now I just learn through reading, but its an issue of sometimes I just end up associating one hanzi with the new word I learned but then as soon as I see it in a new word I don’t even remember having seen it before. If I paid a bit more attention to distinguishing I might notice when I’ve seen them before or they’re new, and have more starting info to relate to the character to attach the word info onto. (its a convoluted way of me saying if I have things to connect to each other I remember better even if it makes little sense to connect them - if I know car and pet, carpet’s easier to remember even though it has nothing to do with cars, cry in french ‘pleurer’ was easier to remember once my brain thought ‘plume of tears’ even though that makes no sense. i just remember things better than seeing pleurer and having no idea what to attach it to at all - even if i heard it means cry, if i don’t have a thing to associate it with i’ll forget easier. or melancholy - i had to associate it with melons, and cholly - reminds me of words for sickness so heavy-sick +sad is how i started finally remembering that word cause wow did i look it up over and over as a kid).

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Japanese study plan from April:

1. continue through nukemarine’s memrise courses.

Okay I did do this!! Congrats! In March I had completed LLJ 3 - Kanji, 289/318 finished in LLJ 4 Tae Kim part 1. As of April, I have completed: LLJ 4 Part 1, LLJ 4 Part 2 51/365, LLJ 5 Core Vocabulary 420/1020. So yeah! Going quite well, in that I consistently did it - I realized for me the best time to do it is playing video games oddly enough, or watching youtube - just do it in between areas, or ep scenes/videos, as a short 5-10 minute break. Since I like taking breaks from things anyway. Like audio, its hard for me to find ways to get myself to do stuff like this (except worse cause I don’t vibe with flashcards).

My goal for May will probably be finish LLJ 4 Part 2, LLJ 5, and start LLJ 6? I can dream right...

Also, a cool note: I found audio-flashcard files that people made of the Japanese Core 2k vocabulary deck and sentences, with english-japanese audio. (If anyone wants a link just let me know). So now if I DO eventually get burned out on flashcards, I could switch to using those. They would work about as well as the Chinese Spoonfed Audio files I have (which work extremely well for me - audio flashcards I just listen to are so much more suited to how I study lol). However, I’d like to stick with Nukemarine’s decks as long as possible while I can focus - they cover grammar explicitly which helps me a lot, and the reading practice COMBINED with constant audio really helps me learn the readings of words. Which is something I need for japanese a LOT more than chinese.

2. continue reading Tae Kim’s grammar guide

Ahahahahaaa hahaaa... did not do it. Nope.

What I did do that was grammar related:

Watched Cure Dolly lessons 1-5 (and will probably watch more as I seem to click well with those explanations)

Read 24 pages of Japanese in 30 Hours while transcribing actual japanese into it (and will probably continue to read it, its so short I should just DO IT in a couple days, it also fulfilled my desire to write stuff)

JapaneseAudioLessons.com - read the wa vs ga explanation, reading the portable japanese grammar notes document right now (its 11 pages I’ll finish it today). I’ve said it before but i really LOVE this resource, and they have so much for free. I absolutely recommend if a beginner wants Pimsleur or Michael Thomas or some other paid resource etc, to just go to this site, download their full lesson grammar guide (its like 311 pages like a real textbook) and go through all their free audio lessons. You will cover a lot of ground (more than Pimsleur or Michael Thomas), and all for free. In addition, I’ve bought some of their kanji teaching books and they’re overall my favorite for remembering kanji specifically (yes more than Heisig’s RTK by far, and more than KKLC - although the Kodanshi book is a good reference to have around). I’m not kidding at all when I say just try this site’s free resources if you’re trying to use free stuff, its the closest I’ve found to an audio only teaching method, or an audio/textbook-like combo, that’s this much stuff and free. (For non free, I actually liked Genki if you do everything in it).

Other misc things done in japanese:

Watched Dracula the Musical in japanese with no subs. It was super hard, but also not so hard. It changed my life. 1000/10 would recommend watching it if you even remotely like dracula OR vampires - featuring a lesbian Dracula/Mina, and more importantly a story change about who kills Dracula, and Dracula and Mina’s agency and choice being the driving force of the ending. These story changes I LOVE and I now want them in more adaptations moving forward, its what I always craved of the ending of Dracula and never got - Dracula as a person (not monster), Mina as a person (not prey), and their choices influencing how the story ends and by whom (versus Van Helsing/the establishment symbol regaining control through annihilation of the ‘threat’ to that norm). Also it gave me a new interest in Japanese plays which is cool. I did not expect to love them this much! Also gave me a boost in japanese confidence, in that I no longer feel as “scared” to try immersing in japanese or in some kinds of content that seemed ‘harder’ - and that was a big hurdle I was too afraid to do, in the past when I studied.

Watched a few more lets plays (lets guess maybe 3-5 sections of 20 minutes?). Persona 2 innocent sin (cool to see me follow along despite not knowing the game), Final Fantasy IX (this one I saved, and could definitely pick up words from since I know some of the story and the lets player read everything - I should look up FFX), random stuff.

Tried to play some games in japanese! I’m going to go with this was about 3 hours. I tried crisis core’s opening to the first save point - it was playable (I can read most of the menus), and I can follow enough text to get the overall gist - however it was draining as so much is text only (I FORGOT how much reading is in this game). Great for reading practice I suppose. Also great in that it definitely reset my expectations about what is ‘doable’ for me - however I do think KH2 is probably still the easiest game i should start trying games with (since I have so many of the controls/menu memorized and can waste less time re-reading the tutorials), and since I know so many words by memory I’ll be able to focus more on grammar (whereas in CC I was glancing through kanji trying to keep up with the live action scenes). A bit too much reading for me to tackle again for a while, it was draining lol. Then I tried persona 3 for psp - first, i like the ps2/ps3 version better ToT. Second, also somehow I could read enough to survive - but the reading again took time, a lot isn’t voiced, and there are not frequent save points. So again I just played to the first save point. That one I may try again before CC though, because a lot more of the language is daily life stuff I could glance through and speed-read-guess lol, or could actually use if I learned it. Also occassionally p3 reads out loud which is nice. I suspect the Visual Novel I got will actually be best for practice (despite me not knowing the plot at all), because I’m guessing more of the lines will be voiced. All this reading would help me more if I could hear it voiced - and I may want to watch more Lets Plays, and Audiobooks on youtube, mainly for that fact: subtitles that i can read WITH audio so i can practice listening and reading together.

Tried reading a bit! First, some mangas I had (though I only read a page of each) - mainly it was just nice to see mangas are more accessible now. they’re about as readable to me rn as manhua were in chinese at 6-8 months in. I can just about follow the main gist, more if I use a dictionary for details. Also thanks to @yue-muffin telling me, learned I can look up words on iphone in the web browser just by highlighting words and clicking “look up.” Life changing. That in combination with me finding some japanese scripts of Final Fantasy games online (and I’ve always been curious what localizations changed), and this has been a little reading I found myself doing just because i felt like it. I didn’t read much - the equivalent of several dialogue boxes (the games i played made me read a LOT more lol). but I liked that i could see their kana when i looked them up, sound the sentences out to myself, contemplate them (so intensive read). Also if you have Speech tools enabled on your phone, you can swipe down with 2 fingers and it will read the page aloud - I used to do that a little with chinese on dual chinese-englist mtlnovel pages since it WILL read both, but Pleco reads chinese better so unless i’m only-listening i switched to pleco for that. But for these scripts it works great! (occasionally it will read all-kanji titles like chinese though lol - not once its into japanese sentences though). I thought it was really cool I could basically emulate what I do in Pleco for chinese, in a normal web browser for Japanese. (Also, for websites, Idiom app seems to work ok for reading Aloud as well - possibly better - but ios iphone “Look up” dictionaries are MUCH better than Idiom app’s).

In summary basically I surprisingly enjoyed reading and might keep trying to do it just because its interesting. However in general, first: I really want 2k words done in Nukemarine’s LLJ courses (LLJ 7 would put me at 1k common words, LLJ 12 would put me at 2k so...), and I’d really like a better grammar foundation (Cure Dolly, or japanese audio lessons grammar, Nukemarine LLJ also obviously fits that task with the grammar portions, really anything). While I want to play games, again I just really realize... how much easier my life will be with a better basis of knowledge first lol. Reading I can do in bite size if I want, but playing games is Draining in between saves right now lol. While i CAN do it right now, unless its a game i really can tune out with (like KH2 maybe) then its just too intensive right now for me to tolerate too much of.

Also, again, I think doing Nukemarine’s LLJ decks as breaks while playing games/watching stuff is working great, going to keep doing that. And listening to audio flashcard files while I have dead time (like level grinding). I have been listening to the Chinese Spoonfed audio, but other options could be: the english-japanese Core 2k audio files, the Japanese Audio Lessons files (which once years ago I’d listen to while excerising). For now I’ve focused on Chinese Spoonfed audio because I know I need to FINISH something before jumping to something else lol.

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French stuff I did in April:

Listened to 6 chapters of Francais Par Le Methode Nature (and read some of them - oh i missed this book its my fave way to learn and it finally has audio!!)

listened to some bits of audiobooks (i don’t even know why, i don’t know - dracula, frankenstein, carmilla, sherlock)

read a little of Le Petit Prince (idk 3 chapters? browsing my book after finishing in chinese and... ok my heart is still a bit ;-; ... i’m gonna need to recover from this story...)

read a bit of dracula (again... idk why... also it was kind of a L R Method step 2 attempt in that I listened to audio too, but really I mainly just... read)

L R Method: 2 Chapters of Alice in Wonderland (step 2, because I have not tried step 3 yet).

What is funny as hell to me is both how many words I look up when I contemplate intensive reading (again life changed by the fact i can just highlight words and click “word lookup” on my phone). But also how I already... know I can thoroughly read without doing it. Like... yes I can look up a word I fuzzy-know to get clarification, but even my phone auto-gives me french-french dictionary first and sometimes only (is it because my google is in french), i’ve been used to french definitions only for years.. and also like... i know when i read a whole paragraph i get whatever words were fuzzy before? just read some of dracula again today and its fine. its fine. again informational texts are easier for me - but dracula being a lot of letters ‘describing what happened’ suits me quite easily (and somehow manages to be less annoying to me than the english version). like... alice in wonderland was probably the harder for all the quick adjectives/verbs used in just one or two paragraphs when i was still re-remembering vocabulary i used to know lol. Like... in a dream world i’d love to test L R Method and see HOW MUCH it can teach a person. But like... while french would be the easiest to test it with? I kind of realize i’m also at a point in french where i have more benefit just continuing to read in french and listen in french (to fix my poor listening skills). referencing the english is not really... particularly necessary, it just usually slows me down. while i’m missing a LOT of words for fluent speaking/grammatically ok speaking - i don’t think listening reading method would really help me with that, since reading sure hasn’t. if any readng material might it’s francais par le methode nature just because it drills simple correct grammar construction, and reinforces it, and teaches grammar through context. but all my other reading materials... are more comprehension...

Anyway in SUMMARY wow i did a lot more than i expected this month!

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Next months goals!

Chinese May Goals:

***Read anything. Great plan, has been working great. Ideally I would like to: finish Xiao Mao book one, and then either continue another Xiao Mao novel or start one of the other stories rated 2+ ease. I am considering 许三观卖血记 because its about as easy as the little prince, I’ve read an excerpt and its historical fiction so generally practical. Or 流星·蝴蝶·剑 by Gu Long if I want to work on a base in wuxia words from an easier novel. Or 他们的故事 by 一根黄瓜丝儿 if I’m ready to return to it - although this one is longer (the other stories being more like 12-20 chapters) so I’d prefer to save this for later. For any of these - look words up as desired since I’ll read them in Pleco. Ideally as my ‘harder’ reading I would like to either continue hanshe (intensive reading), or continue guardian (extensive reading) - so its a matter of if I want to look words up.

***Continue listening to Chinese Spoonfed Audio (please can i Finish it please ;-;)

Optional: experiment with Listening Reading Method. With the finding of those videos on youtube, I’d like to make my life literally as easy and streamlined as possible and literally just TEST L R Method by doing it with a few of the videos I found. It literally cannot get easier than premade videos with audio.

Other optional: listen to misc audio (I would love the time to watch the tian ya ke audiodrama WITH its subtitles then listen without again), watch shows, read Alan Hoenig’s Chinese Characters (i doubt this will happen), do some of my Radical-hanzi book.

Japanese May Goals:

***Continue: Nukemarine’s LLJ courses - ideally finish LLJ 4 Part 2, LLJ 5, and start LLJ 6. (this truly can be basically my only study method if I can’t do more). THIS IS THE PRIORITY. The quicker I get ALL of this done, the more of a foundation I will have to do Anything else.

Hopefully: Continue some kind of grammar explanation beyond Nukemarine’s stuff - either Tae Kim (unlikely but i was at chapter 10 before), Cure Dolly (i’m on 6), Japanese Audio Lessons Grammar, Japanese in 30 Hours while writing japanese in (I’m on page 24). Again this is a higher priority as it will make anything else easier.

Optional: Reading in any form - so video game time, lets plays, audiobook youtube with captions, actual reading as desired (like scripts). Including this because I know I will eventually try again lol.

Optional: listening in any form - so another musical! maybe listen to japanese audio lessons, or the core 2k audio, or a lets play, etc. I find I’m probably less likely to listen to something but it might happen!

French May Goals*:

*aka if I feel like doing it because french has no real goals at the moment! -3-)/

***Continue watching Le Francais Par Le Methode Nature videos. (There’s only 33, they’re like 10 minutes long or less, its about basics, PLEASE). I remember this book took forever to read 1/3 of when i was an upper beginner, well now surely its less slow going? especially because read aloud its as fast as the speakers voice! so it is not time consuming and i’ve wanted to finish this book forever! i could at least finish it up to where the audio files match to!

Read???? Read??? Honestly I’ve just been wanting to read Dracula and Carmilla in French its a vibe I’ve been in. Its not high priority or anything but hey it might happen. If it does happen, ideally I’d like to listen to an audiobook too around the same time (maybe after, or have the page read, idk). Just because while reading refreshes my vocab, what I really want to build up is listening/pronunciation. To get to a point where I can listen and shadow would be nice.

Tied to above, try L R Method? Not a high priority, though it would be super easy to test! Just because I already started testing it with Alice in Wonderland... but that basically amounts to just reading practice with audio again, for me.

I found Merlin in french so THAT is a thing.

Honestly the only thing I really want to do ‘study’ wise in french is finish that freaking book, especially now that I can listen to audio with it. It’s a nice foundation and I’d really like a refresher/fill in any big gaps in my learning. Anything else about french written here is mostly a reminder to myself to LISTEN to audio when possible, and try and improve that skill a bit if I go and read.

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Real fast CORE SUMMARY:

Chinese: READ easier stories rated 2+ and keep getting through some, in combination with reading the harder hanshe and Guardian. Also listen to Chinese Spoonfed audio whenever u remember! Attempt some L-R method with the youtube videos you found. Immerse as desired.

Japanese: continue Nukemarine LLJ courses. Also do some grammar study somewhere, and immerse as desired.

French: listen/listen-read to Francais Par Le Methode Nature. Also read/listen as desired - ideally combining the activities.

*in all cases, where possible, combine listening-reading or try to practice both skills. (So reading in Pleco - play audio afterward to practice, play Guardian condensed audio in down time, with audiodramas follow subs when possible, when immersing with anything try L-R like strategies to add practice with both skills).

#rant #april progress #april goals #may study plan #study plan #may goals #may #what i learned from this is... i have no fucking structure guys #im a mess i just do Whatever #only thing close to ANY structure is that with chinese im fairly consistent about reading #someone help me come up with a cleaner study plan?#or is the fact just that this is Just how i study???#do i just need to bounce and do random stuff?

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sineala · 5 years

Text

Avengers: The Man Who Stole Tomorrow

Now we come to the 1970s Marvel Comics prose novel that I was most excited to read -- Avengers: The Man Who Stole Tomorrow by David Michelinie. If you're familiar with the comics you can probably guess why I was excited, which is because, unlike all the other authors of these books, Michelinie was an actual writer at Marvel at the time he was writing this. He's probably most famous for his two Iron Man runs with Bob Layton -- the first of which was already ongoing in 1979 when this book was released -- but he also wrote actual Avengers issues during this time period. He didn't have a continuous run but he did about 25 issues total.

So I was really looking forward to this one, because I figured that, surely, if anyone could write a good Avengers novel it was going to be the guy who was literally writing actual Avengers comic books at the same time. And furthermore, I figured, given how beloved his Iron Man run is (Doomquest! Demon in a Bottle!), I might luck out and get some really good Tony characterization.

(I should say right now that if you're reading this hoping for Steve/Tony, there really isn't any. Sorry. I think they might exchange a couple words in the middle of an action scene at some point, but it's very sweet that they appear together on one of the chapter header images. That's about it.)

What I found was... complicated.

Michelinie isn't a bad writer, exactly. He's written some amazing comics, and he's very good at the banter here. He's not so great at writing prose and there is a lot of unnecessary exposition (like, there are three paragraphs about how Tony's repulsors work before he fires them the first time, which really slows down the action scene) and so many epithets, oh my God, so many epithets. So, I mean, he's not really a great novelist, but I have read a lot worse, and he's good at making the Avengers feel like the Avengers, which is what I wanted.

The problem here is everything else.

I know I haven't usually bothered going through the plots of these novels in a lot of detail because I've been reading them for character rather than for plot, but this is a very plot-motivated book. And so I think I'd really better summarize this whole thing, because it's basically two books shoved together. The first book is basically everything I wanted this book to be -- tense, dramatic, anchored in canon with a nice deep dive into canonical history that actually works, and it had me very, very excited to read the second half. I was really loving where this plot was going.

The second half of this book is where this book proceeds to go completely fucking off the rails.

Let me explain.

Okay. So the Avengers team these days is Tony, Steve, Thor, Vision, Wanda, Pietro, and Beast. We open with some team bonding in Avengers Mansion, a lot of exposition about who everyone is, Tony's secret identity, how Pietro still hates that Wanda and Vision are married, how Beast is a ladies' man and will crack jokes at every available opportunity. You get the idea.

They then decide to start the debriefing about their most recent mission. They are taping the debriefing, which is relevant because they are interrupted by a guy who shows up, calling himself Aningan Kenojuak, and he summons a magic bright green polar bear, knocks out all the Avengers, steals Steve, and disappears. When the Avengers wake up they conclude he is an "Eskimo shaman" who is probably from Alaska (okay, yes, there is some race fail here, but there is a reason that this specific guy is what he is, because this is one of those things that's gonna come up when you're dealing with Silver Age comics) and when they review the tapes (that recorded the whole thing) they hear him talking about someone "wing-footed."

So you remember how, in Avengers #4, there was that whole thing where Namor finds "an isolated tribe of Eskimos" who are bowing down and worshipping the frozen body of Captain America (not visible as Captain America at the time) as a god and Namor gets mad about that and throws the whole iceberg into the ocean and that's where Steve is when the Avengers find him?

So this Kenojuak, it turns out, was the guy who found Steve in the ice, and he really wants his god back, so he uses his magic String of Stones -- touching his string was also what summoned his magic polar bear -- to cover Steve in ice again. So now he has him here in Alaska covered in ice. Yep. Captain America has gotten iced again. Imagine how he must feel.

Meanwhile, Tony and Vision go to Atlantis to see Namor, who admits that maybe once upon a time he might have done something like that to a body he found, but what's it to you, land-dwellers? Also, fuck off. That's when Kenojuak comes to Atlantis and attacks Namor with his polar bear. They fight him off, he retreats to Alaska, and Namor agrees to help out. I guess he cares about Steve too.

We have some fun team banter on the Quinjet as Beast insists on playing Devo, while Pietro is no fun and would prefer some nice classical music, like Dvorak's New World Symphony. (The lyrics to Devo's "Jocko Homo" appear to be quoted without permission.)

Anyway. Kenojuak gets back to Alaska, hauls the Capsicle out of his igloo and goes looking for his village -- I guess it's been a few years since he's been home -- which has apparently been destroyed by a pipeline and replaced by a town and this makes him very angry and he's going to use his magic to destroy it. The Avengers show up and stop him, earning the gratitude of the town's residents, and they finally get Steve back.

This is when they find out that Steve... isn't melting. Uh oh.

Kenojuak, defeated, hands over his magic String of Stones to the Avengers, at which point they find out that it is not in fact magic but Sufficiently Advanced Technology. The Blue Totem gave it to him, he says, to accomplish his task. Can he describe the Blue Totem? Sure, he had a blue face and he wore purple and green and the Avengers are starting to have a really, really bad feeling about this because...

It's Kang. It's obviously Kang the Conqueror.

So what they have to do now is find Kang -- an explanation of who Kang is that is actually pretty comprehensible then follows -- and get him to unfreeze Steve, and the problem with finding Kang is of course that he could be anywhere in time.

So at this point in the book I was very excited. I mean, Steve's in peril! We have this fun plot thread linked to his actual canonical history! The Avengers are going to have to travel through time and save him from Kang! It's going to be just as dramatic and amazing and make me feel all the feelings as the Avengers strive to save Captain America!

I regret to inform you that this, alas, is where this book gets really fucking weird.

Beast picks up Steve's frozen body -- he'll be the one holding onto Steve here, pretty much -- and the team gathers together and apparently Thor can just time-travel by swinging Mjolnir around over their heads? Was anyone going to tell me this or was I supposed to find it out for myself?

Anyway, they end up in the year 3900, on an Earth where everything seems to be made of plastic (even the grass) and the first guy they meet is jealous of Beast for having so much fur and jealous of Tony for having so much metal. Everyone has stupid future slang. They are apparently all in some kind of theme park for humanity, and this guy is happy to point the way to Kang, who lives in a giant building with his name on the side. That was easy.

The building is basically a maze, and Beast gets split from the main team twice, and the second time they don't even bother going looking for him, even though he is the guy carrying Steve. It's a little weird. But they all make it to Kang's HQ just fine; Beast comes in through a service door because apparently he asked directions? It is really weird.

And Kang is all too happy to help them. He explains that he basically just gave Kenojuak the technology for the lulz once he found out what the guy wanted to do and he figured there was no way he was going to manage to ice Captain America. So the Avengers ask him to please bring Cap back and he does and Steve is perfectly fine.

So, you know... so much for narrative tension.

They leave Kang's HQ and are hanging out in the theme park, about to go home, and they're talking about how that was all too easy... when a Tyrannosaurus Rex attacks them.

Yeah.

The Avengers save everyone from the dinosaur but not before the nearby Richard M. Nixon Memorial Massage Parlor nearby -- look, I said this book was fucking weird -- is destroyed and its angry owner comes running out and she is a sexy, scantily clad woman, which the book makes sure to tell us. She is happy to tell them that they all agreed to live here under Kang's rule because otherwise he would destroy them because his plan... is to rule all of history!

I have no conceivable idea why this should come as a shock to the Avengers because it is pretty much the only thing Kang has ever wanted (except for the times he wants to try to kill one of his selves).

Nonetheless, the Avengers are shocked! And they realize that Kang only let them get away so easily because it was a trap! And now they have to go back and actually fight Kang! But first the rest of the team has to tell Beast he can't have a quickie with the massage parlor owner before they fight Kang. Yes, really. I had to read this with my own two eyes.

Anyway, they fight their way back to Kang and it is a lot tougher this time because they are dodging, among other things, pterosaurs and Messerschmitts (did you know that one model had a jet engine? I did not know this!), but Steve is good at tactics and the Avengers are all good fighters. This time when they make it back to Kang, he just says he can open time portals to anywhere and send them through and kill them all. Except he's not gonna kill Beast because Beast is blue and I guess Kang likes that in a guy.

So it's a good thing he's not going to kill Beast because while the Avengers are distracted with the time portals fighting samurai or whatever, Beast creeps around, figures out all the portal controls, eventually traps Kang, and then scatters him across, like, seventeen time portals so he's not going to be a threat any time soon. So that's how Beast saves the Avengers from Kang in, like, one page.

Anyway. All the Avengers go home and live happily ever after, except Steve, who feels guilty for letting down that one guy who thought he was a god so he's gonna go hang out in Alaska for a bit and talk to him.

So I think you can see why I'm kind of conflicted about this book -- I loved the first half (modulo the Silver Age racism) and thought it was going places and I was really excited about this dramatic story of the Avengers rescuing Captain America and then the second half was... I don't even know how to describe it. It was like they were two different books, and the first one was a four or five star book and the second one was, like... one. The characters were good, though, I guess. I just... what the fuck. I don't even know what I just read.

I also feel like fandom would be able to do a lot better than this -- like, "Steve is frozen and stolen by Kang the Conqueror" would be a great prompt and would make for some great stories and none of them would be this one. I feel like if this had been a comic and more people had read it we would have a dozen AUs. I just wanted... angst and feelings, I guess.

Of all these books so far, it's the one I paid the most for, and I'm not sorry I bought it, but I also definitely don't think it's worth the prices it's going for on the used market, because the actual plot is... really a letdown. Given Michelinie's comics work, I was expecting a lot more from this. I think I'd rec the Iron Man book, and then the Cap book, and then this. (I also have the Doctor Strange one, if anyone wants me to read and review that.)

But, hey, it does have a great title.

#posts i actually wrote

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years

Text

Book Review... Maria Hudgins, “Death in an Ivory Tower”

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: mystery

Part of a Series? Yes, #5 of 5 (so far)

Summary: It's a scholarly conference at Oxford and the subject is The Lingering Effects of the King Arthur Tales on Life in Elizabethan England, but two participants don t fit in. Dotsy Lamb, PhD candidate from Virginia, has inadvertently invited a couple of New Agers from Glastonbury. Their agenda is to prove to these arrogant academics that King Arthur and Guinevere were real people. As a big surprise, Bram Fitzwaring plans to produce their royal bones. Fitzwaring doesn't show up for his scheduled address because he s still in his room. Dead. An insulin-dependent diabetic, Fitzwaring appears to have died from hypoglycemia. But Dotsy, also diabetic, says his symptoms prior to his demise do not spell hypoglycemia. They spell murder.

***Full review under the cut.***

Overview: I need to tell you how I came across this book and why I decided to read it. A very close friend who is an Arthurian scholar took me to Half Price Books to buy me something for my birthday, and as we were browsing, she came across this book. Keep in mind, we’re BOTH medievalists, so when we saw the synopsis on the back, we immediately went “this is it... this is the birthday book.” And so I read it. And it was a wild ride, alternating between amusement and tedium. If you’re an academic, particularly one who studies medieval literature, you’ll need to just push past all the bizarre things that the author thinks a graduate student (of any age) does. Despite all that (or, perhaps, because of them), I was highly entertained for a good portion of the book while simultaneously being bored in parts where the plot dragged.

Writing: Hudgins’ writing isn’t very difficult to follow, so you can skim the book if you’re the type of reader that likes to finish books quickly. There were never any moments where I was confused as to what was going on, yet I also can’t say there was anything about the writing that stood out either. It was just kind of a middle-of-the-road, “popcorn” style. What was a bit more irritating for me was how the writing bogged down the plot. Because Dotsy takes the time to describe what she does in the order she does it, as well as drop in huge chunks of backstory or historical information when she feels like it’s warranted, the sense of urgency or suspense is absent. It rather feels more like “I did this. Then I did this. Here’s how this character’s past went. Then I did this.” For example, it takes 4 paragraphs for Dotsy to explain how she is able to decipher some of the murdered victim’s notes - and it could have been done in 1. As a result, there’s not really any clue as to what details from the text are significant for the mystery, nor am I interested to see how the plot unfolds.

Characters: Dotsy Lamb was actually a very enjoyable character for me. When I learned that she was a woman in her 60s pursuing a PhD, my first thought was “You go girl!” I also liked that she was diabetic - I can’t recall any other books I’ve read in which the main character is diabetic. It’s pretty great for representation, all around. Everyone else was just kind of incidental. Some of them had interesting quirks, but a lot of them just popped in and out at random. I guess they were distinct enough in personality and function that I could remember them and tell them apart, so that was good.

Plot: The idea that someone might have been murdered by academics in order to cover up the fact that Arthur was real was too good to pass up. But to be honest, I did find the pacing of the plot to be rather slow. Dotsy doesn’t make much headway on the case for the first few dozen pages, instead summarizing her experience to others. She doesn’t seem too determined to solve anything either, and while I know she’s no detective (professionally), I would have liked to see more drive from her. Personally, I found the mystery itself to be rather underwhelming, once it was unraveled. Due to the lack of suspense, it didn’t really feel like much was at stake, and the writing style made it difficult for me to feel invested in one theory or another. I think more careful, deliberate plotting would have helped in this regard.

Other Academics: As an academic myself, I was constantly going back and forth between “That’s ridiculous!” and “No, that’s legit” whenever Dotsy did anything related to her PhD. The fact that Dotsy is writing about Shakespeare, but teaches Classics and Medieval Literature without knowing any Latin (she says so explicitly) and goes to an elite conference on Arthurian Literature (which seems to only have 9 attendees) was wild. On the one hand, yeah, pre-modern studies people are expected to know everything about the world before 1800. On the other, why on earth is Dotsy going to this conference if she’s not writing about Arthuriana? The conference itself also seemed very surface-level, so it felt like a basic history course rather than a gathering of elites. No one would go to a prestigious academic conference to give a paper on the definition of courtly love nowadays, or a paper on the dissolution of the monasteries without a unique angle on it. Of course, most people don’t know how academics work, so I have to cut the author some slack. But it did make for some amusing reading. One thing that was accurate, unfortunately, was the relationship between Dotsy and her adviser. The adviser seemed to be puffed up by his own brilliance, but still relied on Dotsy’s labor to make himself look good. It’s not right, but it exists.

Continuing on with the series? No.

Recommendations: I would recommend this book if you’re interested in dark academia or mystery novels.

#book reviews

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awed-frog · 6 years

Note

About your griffin post, about it being Protoceratops... It's not true. Mark Witton did an in-depth discussion about it.

Yes, about that - as I said in the notes, I’m grateful to the person who posted the link because I’d never heard of any of that, and the more diverse perspectives on stuff, the better. That said, a few things about his rebuttal (and yours):

1. When it comes to religion, mythology and folklore studies, there’s no such thing as ‘true’ and ‘not true’. You can categorize theories with other words, such as ‘likely’, ‘probable’, ‘possible’ and ‘utter troll dung’, but those are not exact sciences, so while it’s possible to follow a rigorous and scientific approach, it’s difficult (or even impossible) to prove anything in a definite way.

2. Adrienne Mayor’s book had an interdisciplinary approach. Mark Witton’s article did not. Now, this is more to Mayor’s credit than to Witton’s demerit, because you’re not going to contact fifteen colleagues for a blog post, but it’s worth noting that the lack of interdisciplinary research is a huge problem in academia, and it’s especially noticeable in ancient history (or maybe I notice it more because it’s my field, I don’t know). Since people tend to be either word-minded or numbers-minded, what you get is a series of extremely well-prepared specialists looking at stuff - while being completely ignorant of 98% of the world they’re examining. An ancient Greek scholar, for instance, will know a lot about linguistic shifts but squat about bread making, and that’s a bad way to understand a whole culture. Mayor, who’s more on the word side of the equation, made an effort to consult with science-oriented colleagues; Witton didn’t do that (although, as I said, that’s perfectly normal for the writing format he was using) and it shows.

3. About his first argument, ie that griffins are found in Near Eastern art: who cares? What you need to do here is not look at how you see the world, but at how a Greek person would see the world. Near Eastern griffins are not relevant - not because they don’t exist (they do) or because they’re not objectively fascinating (they are). They’re not relevant because they’re not mentioned in this context by Greek texts. None of the authors Mayor discusses made a connection between the Central Asia griffins and the Persian griffins. Maybe they didn’t know about the other ones, maybe they saw them as different animals - I honestly don’t know. But if they didn’t draw a connection between the two thing, then neither should we. I know mythology books tend to have categories on ‘monsters’ and offer enthralling images of ‘sirens’, ‘giants’ and ‘demons’ from around the world, but the fact is, how a specific culture understands that monster is likely to differ a lot from what their neighbours think of them. Sphinxes are a good example. There’s the Egyptian sphinx and the Greek sphinx - those are never discussed in the same papers because, despite the fact they do have superficial similarities, they’re very different creatures in what concerns their role in their respective societies’ religious and conceptual landscapes.

4. About his second argument, ie that protoceratops bones are not as widespread as she suggests, and one wouldn’t trip on skulls every two seconds - again, so what? As long as those fossils can be placed in that area at the right time, I’m good. This is not a scientific experiment the Scythians are carrying out: one skull is enough to suggest a story behind it, one trader sharing that story in his travels is enough to make it grow, and one bartender telling Herodotus about it is enough to validate it. The Amazons are a very good example of how that works. The idea of a tribe of women warriors had fascinated the Greek for centuries (they’re mentioned in the Iliad) before Herodotus wrote about them confirming they were real people doing real stuff. Western scholars have been scoffing at him ever since - and they kept scoffing until Soviet archaeologists started finding graves of women who’d been buried with weapons. Now - did archaeologists ever find a cemetery that was 100% badass female warriors? No. Did they find a cemetery that was 50% female warriors? Also no. To the best of our current knowledge, some of those Siberian-based tribes had - occasionally - warrior queens, or high-status women who used weapons. They were not Amazons in the traditional sense of the word, but it’s not that hard to imagine what must have happened there: one foreign delegation headed by an armed queen would have been enough to make any Greek go wtf and ooooohh, because that would have been so exotic - Greek women didn’t use weapons (and neither did Persian women, or Egyptian women - cultures some Greeks would have been familiar with) - so the sight of that must have left quite a deep mark. And since that’s how humans work, one warrior queen can become ‘a whole race of man-hating badass women’ in two seconds flat. I mean, we know that’s how storytelling works, and what happens with dubious or spotty record keeping, but also - how many times has that happened to you? You meet one Korean guy, he’s the only Korean you know and he’s an asshole - before you know it, you start to assume that’s what all Koreans are like. It’s just how we’re wired, and I guess it was supposed to be about protecting us from poisonous plants (‘Sure, that other red berry almost killed my brother, but what about this one?’ - that would have seen us extinct in no time), but it’s also something we need to keep in check, because no - people are not ‘all the same’ just because they belong to the same ‘tribe’.

5. Another argument he makes is that Central Asia to Greece is rather a long distance for Chinese whispers and legend swapping, and that’s so wrong I don’t even know what to say. This is exactly what I meant when I said people can be experts in their field (in Witton’s case, paleontology) while being pretty ignorant about others, because the ancient world was way more connected than what we imagine it to be. We know that even in prehistoric times, there were crowded trade routes moving from the Baltics to Greece, that people travelled hundreds of miles to go to some sanctuary on a Scottish island, and that yeah - ideas and legends did travel with goods, sometimes in a very lasting way. The traces of Buddhist doctrine, for instance, are all over Greek philosophy. This is a subject that’s only recently been explored because people like to believe Greek culture was born fully-formed without any foreign influences, but the studies on the exchanges between India and Greece - well before Alexander’s times - are fascinating. So no, I’m not disturbed in the slightest by the fact news about ‘griffin skulls’ seem to have travelled from the Gobi to Athens. That stuff happened, and as I mentioned above, all you need is one person - one guy who’s well-spoken enough, convincing enough, or convinced enough - one guy who doesn’t want Greek traders anywhere near his gold-stuffed mountains - talking to a second person. Today we’ve only got about 10% of Greek literature, but Greeks were an inquisitive bunch, and the country was littered with self-styled historians, geographers and anthropologists who spent their time either traveling around or paying drinks to whomever seemed foreign enough to be interesting. That method has limits, by the way - I myself once invented a fair bit of my town’s history because I was sixteen and bored and those tourists had seen me with my Latin textbook and asked me if I knew anything about Roman settlements in the area, so. I mean - half of a Greek historian’s paragraph start with ‘A man in Samos told me’ - God knows who they were even talking to. A local priest keen to increase tourism, the village idiot - anything’s possible.

6. Finally, something else that’s just uh is how Witton says, why single out griffins? What about other monsters? And, well, that’s the whole point of Mayor’s book. We know for sure ancient people found fossils; what we’re trying to figure out is what impact (if any) that had on their worldview. For instance, fossils did not suggest the idea of evolution, but they did mess with (or confirm) some of their religious beliefs. I’m hoping to summarize other chapters of Mayor’s book in more detail, but just a couple of examples: the Greeks, like many other ancient people, believed their ancestors to have been much taller and stronger than themselves -

(This, by the way, it’s another tantalizing way the outside world may - or may not - have influenced thought and belief: did the Greeks believe that because of the monumental architecture older cultures had left behind, or did those staggering things confirm an idea that had sprung from a different source? Like, humans tend to be pessimistic mofos, so it’s plenty possible you’d assume people are becoming smaller and weaker just because, and next the finding of a Daedalic temple just confirms that for you, because how the hell could anyone built that and Jesus Christ? Or maybe you find that temple first, and adjust your theology accordingly. We just don’t know. Hell - we’re struggling to explain contemporary religious phenomena - everything and anything from ISIS to spontaneous lynchings in India to cults - we have zero chance of fully understanding Greek religion in a way that allows us to say, ‘that’s right’ or ‘that’s wrong’.)

- and they also believed in monstrous giants dying in riverbeds (many Greek rivers are named after giants). Both things are probably related to the giant-ass femurs which kept cropping up in fields and - well - riverbeds, so no - griffins are not the lone exception. We know of people finding stuff they assume to be giant bones, divine cattle, cyclops - if you can think of it, there’s probably a fossil for it.

Ultimately, I just want to say: Mayor does offer some rather sweeping statements, but, then again, her book is aimed at a general audience. Too many conditionals and no one’s buying it (or understanding it). On the other hand, she also never pretends to hold any Universal Truth over the subject she’s exploring, because that’s how (good) academia works: you expect (and encourage) rebuttals, corrections, discussions. That’s how we progress.

Personally, what attracts me to these theories is that they’re part of a movement that’s arising - bloody finally - acknowledging man is not the centre of the known and unknown universe.

Until very recently, we were told the physical world has zero influence on what we think and how we feel - because we’re a superior animal, that is, so that stuff doesn’t touch us in the same way it does other (lower) beasts. And while that is true to an extent - if there’s an inconvenient river, we move it - saying that the world around us has no impact on our souls, brains and way of life - that’s just laughably pretentious. We now know something as banal as the weather can completely transform our mood and our decision-making, even on the long term - that trees make us smarter, that urban landscapes are likely to give migraines - there are studies in experimental archaeology in how landscape influences thought (like, you bury someone in a fetal position because the ground is too hard, you make yourself feel better by imagining he’s like a baby in the mother’s womb and will one day be reborn), and a lot of new ideas about folklore and religion. This line of studies on fossils is one example of that; another is how geography impacts theology - I don’t remember who it was, but I know someone suggested the reason human sacrifice is more common in tropical cultures is because in a jungle, death will immediately (and very visibly) feed new life, whereas in colder climates the relation is not that apparent. And again, it may never be possible to prove right and wrong there. Even if we had a time machine, these things are tricky to understand. People think of faith and belief in different ways, approach their religion through their own filter, will pretend to go along with stuff for personal gain. Who knows. The only thing we can be sure of is that those fossils would have been understood differently by different people. To some, that would have been proof of mythical monsters. To others, a way to strengthen their flock’s faith and thus cement social cohesion. And to others still, it was probably just a way to make money - a temple displaying a ‘griffin skull’ would have led to people selling griffin statues and opening griffin-themed restaurants, same as you see today in places like Lourdes or Fatima. Humans are messy. History is messy. That’s what’s beautiful (and infuriating) about both.

#ask #griffins #mythology #greek mythology #religion #mark witton #sorry i'm not including links #i'm late for a job #gaaaaaah #i hope this made sense?#but i'm open to discuss this of course #witton's perspective was genuinely interesting

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spaceshipkat · 6 years

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Found a stan's post about what Sjm said at her Houston stop regarding ToG and Acotar characters meeting.Just so much bullshit: "Rhys would win in a fight against Maeve because Maeve is a “piece of crap” who only fights for her own selfish wants and Rhys would fight for something he loves and therefore have a better reason to fight", "Aelin would spend the entire time staring at Rhys because even though she has Rowan who is also beautiful, Rhys is just that beautiful", "everyone would love Rowan"

Houston anon, if you wanna watch the whole thing, TheTruthAboutBooks made a vlog on yt

uhhh did they say they’d have booths for fanart?

i freely admit i’ve eaten a lot of airheads today, but…i’m nauseous.

what the diddly dong heck is this. according to the vid, you can take a pic with them, but no idea if you can keep them.

why are they screaming

as someone from AZ, why is all she remembers of it cowboy boots?

and imma paraphrase the questions she’s asked, so. question #1:

McGee: you’ve been writing t0g since you were 16, how do you feel, what’s going through your head?

sj/m: writing k0a was bittersweet and fun. when i was 16, all of this was a crazy dream (she has been saying this literally everywhere. i mean she even made it a hashtag on insta today). “when i went to college i was a creative writing major” uhhh where???

interlude for a brief thanks that does sound sincere, at least.

and now she’s saying that on Tuesday she asked if anyone had read the book, a teenager said yes, and sj/m proceeds to, uh, very snarkily reenact it with a raised index finger (terrible quality, i’m sorry; it’s at 11:55 in the vid)

christ you guys she’s been answering this question for eons i want it to stop, especially bc right now she’s talking about getting to write the final scenes of a book she’s been working on since she was a teenager. we know the drill.

okay wait now she’s saying when t0g was bought fantasy (yes, fantasy, not ya fantasy) hadn’t taken off and had just one publisher say yes to t0g. everyone else rejected it and i have a feeling they don’t regret that in the slightest.

oh my god she’s still talking. the author moderating the event (Katharine McGee) hasn’t said one word since that first question.

she just asked if there are any other aspiring writers in the ground, and then said that “if i can do it, you can do it” and i’m cackling. and getting published is “a long road” and that wasn’t a tornado, it was just me sighing. (today was a shitty day in terms of publishing where i’m concerned, so yeah)

and now she’s talking about how the book was going to be longer than 992 pages, originally 1008 pages. she gets a call from her editor, who says “the book is too long” and sj/m replies “you can’t do this to me EVERY WORD AND EVERY COMMA IS EXACTLY WHERE IT NEEDS TO BE” (emphasis my own) OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD @longsightmyth

and apparently her editor said “we have to find a way to make the book shorter without cutting anything from it” and sure, janet. and christ on a bike the entire team at blooms worked around the clock to get the book to the printers in two days, or it wouldn’t have been printed in time for release. they bumped up the text a little on the chapter header, condensed chapters through the formatting so hanging paragraphs between chapters would fit on the previous page.so cutting out one whole page, basically.

sj/m: so they managed to cut it down to nine hundred and ninety–”

audience: “980″

sj/m: nine hundred and ninety–”

audience: “980″

sj/m: “whatever it is!” *waves hand*

i’m now at 16:53 and McGee has finally spoken since sitting down.

McGee: “who knew eight pages could be so important”

sj/m: “i have no idea” (i’m typing this on my laptop but i’d have the upside down smiley here on my phone bc the tone here is that)

WE’VE MADE IT TO QUESTION #2 (and i’m paraphrasing again)

question #2:

McGee: i want to go back to what you were saying about writing scenes that you thought of as a teenager and reaching the end of the series is so emotional. did anything change, take any unexpected turns, or is this truly the ending that you foresaw at age 16?

guys i’m sorry i can’t sit through her answer bc if is basically a reworked version of everything i wrote above and everything she has said umpteen times (all about fictionpress, to get this book published she had to rewrite new things, treat the first version as a completely separate book, start over with a blank page, blah blah blah i really don’t give a fuck, janet moving on)

i’m not sure if she mentioned this in the other events, but she’s explaining how she wrote ratalien fanfic.

question #3:

McGee: was it hard for you when the first two books came out and the readers were all excited trying to ship–

and yes, sj/m did cut her off. McGee jumped in to ask question #3 and here’s sj/m while McGee is asking the question

and now she’s talking about tambourine and riceman. so.

she’s talking about some animal that went extinct from Costa Rica? “go vote and save the environment” and now she’s explaining where she got the ending for k0a from (the mountains and the sun and she started crying) worth noting she said she went to Costa Rica in 2013, thereby getting the ending of k0a in 2013.

guys i want to donate my ears to science as well as my eyeballs:

sj/m: alien never did what i wanted her to do except doing rowboat, if you know what i mean (emphasis not my own)

i just laughed out loud at sj/m: “please let alien get me to this ending that i want, if she survives.” one of the biggest surprises was getting alien to the ending that she wanted.

question #4:

McGee: i love what you said about aelin, i feel like she has literally grown up alongside you, or you’ve grown up alongside her, she’s such a fun character bc she’s vulnerable and strong and she’s not afraid to be both badass and very girly at the same time

(you guys know my thoughts about the ridiculousness of still complimenting alien for being badass and girly like the two are not mutually exclusive and no longer unique character traits can we stop now kthxbai)

McGee continued: how has she rubbed off on you, are there any traits of aelin that have become traits of sarah

she’s nodding along while McGee talks here:

sj/m: her love of reading, her love of binge-eating chocolate in bed, oh my god she’s now off on another tangent about getting started in publishing again and before she had meetings she’d tell herself “my name is sjm and i will not be afraid” omg so deep wow

so now we know why she made Lysandra a snow leopard (yes this is my assumption): she has a leopard ring and her leopard shirt bc you can never have too much leopard on leopard

so with alien and Lysandra and all the ladies in this series, they’re all strong in different ways, elide can’t gut you the way alien can, she has her own strength (intelligence and kindness), then Manon (her favorite) came into her life at a time she needed a character to identify with, Manon’s journey is one of her favorite things she’s ever written.

aaaaaaaand a side story wherein she explains how Manon appeared in her head and saw Manon in her first scene in h0f after music and i’m snoring (and then another piece of music where she saw a scene in k0a and began sobbing but she doesn’t say which scene)

and now she’s talking about how thick the books are. someone says all the books should be the same size on the shelf and sj/m says “look at Harry Potter! whose rule is that? it’s a dumb rule” (claims she said it “i understand but no”–emphasis not my own)

OH MY GOD SHE’S EXPLAINING HOW SHE’S NEVER CRIED MORE IN A SCENE IN K0A AND GUYS I AM SO BEYOND DONE SHE’S JUST REPEATING HERSELF IN NEW WAYS I WANT DEATH

McGee: i love how all your women are strong in different ways, even Kaltain, characters who start one way and then their story seems expected and it ends in such a different place

congrats, McGee, you just described writing a character arc (i apologize for the snark but ugh)

McGee continued: which brings me to the dedication of this book, do you want to talk about that at all, there might be zero people in the audience who’ve read k0a yet, what do you want to say to them before they start reading?

what would you call this expression? grimace? “hOw DaRe”?

and now she’s talking about the dedication, which we all know my thoughts on (i’ll spare you from another repeat bc i, unlike sj/m, try not to say the same things over and over again)

every time a book came out her parents would open the book and ask why it wasn’t dedicated to them and she wanted to wait to dedicate the last book to them, so. (she thought the dedication would be a spoiler but “ladies are gonna get shit done,” “take on the man,” wah wah) and she’s mentioned ac0tar again.

HOLY SHIT SHE JUST ASKED MCGEE WHO SHE DEDICATED HER BOOK TO I AM SHOOK. “aw that’s so sweet, i don’t have a sister so i can’t dedicate it like you can” (yes i’m paraphrasing again)

and she’s brought out Taran. he’s cute and all and oh my god “i can hear a baby crying and go ‘eh i don’t care he’s not my baby’ but then i hear my baby” and blah blah blah

we’ll end this with Taran bc he’s cute:

#ask #anonymous #anti sjm #anti koa #long post #save #i need to remember to use that tag more often

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haydenstudiesblog-blog · 6 years

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Paper Tips + Tricks in Lit(erature)

Sorry for that super lame title

Tip #1: Summarize in Lists

It’s always a good idea (BUT NOT REQUIRED) to include some sort of brief summary in your paper, but a common problem is allowing this summary to take up too much space on the page. We don’t need a run-down of the entire story; whoever is reading this paper has already read it. You just need enough to jog their memory. I suggest making a list of the important events in the story, the events that relate to your thesis, and pick the most important ones to use in the summary.

Tip #2: Include Author and Title

It’s 100% required to mention both the author and title of the story you are analyzing or discussing in your paper. Like, non-negotiable. This may seem annoying, but there’s a super easy way to accomplish this... Just put it at the beginning of the thesis. Super easy, right?

Here’s an example of an introductory paragraph I recently used in one of my paper, which got high marks (9.5/10 points) -

Although many refuse to believe it, Christianity has a history of absorbing Pagan traditional values and forms. In her short story “The Company of Wolves” Angela Carter uses the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” to demonstrate the complex relationship between Christianity and Paganism through the use of symbolic religious imagery.

So. Simple. And I didn’t even include a summary (which I did not get docked points for doing).

Tip #3: Include Genre

I took note of this the other day in my literature class. We cover up the name of whoever wrote the paper and project it onto the board to talk through together. One person included the genre in the middle of the author and title mention, so it looked something like this -

In her fantasy-horror short story “The Company of Wolves” Angela Carter blah blah blah...

My professor commented on that, how she loved the inclusion of the genre, so I took note of it. It’s always nice to take note of the little things your professor likes to see in papers.

***However, I only recommend doing this if you’re super confident in the story’s genre. Or you can always look it up online.

Tip #4: Vampires Don’t Always Work

You may be thinking, “Uhh, vampires? When are there ever really vampires in literature? Why would I assume they always work?” Well, my friend, listen to this... There are more vampires in literature than we think. No, not the literal kind. I’m talking about literary vampire imagery. Example? You got it -

Karen Joy Fowler’s “Heartland” is a short story about a young girl, Willina, who feels trapped in a tourist-trap version of Oz. She finds solace in a tourist who flirts with her at work, and she makes plans to run away with him. Then he leaves her behind, and she is so lost in anguish and longing that she decides the only way out is to take her own life. In this short story, Fowler plays with feelings of longing, ambition, and love; she successfully connects these feelings to victim-shaming and sexual assault through the use of vampire imagery.

Not my best introductory paragraph OR thesis, but you kind of get the idea, yes? It’s easier to understand if you read my paper, which you can; I posted it on my blog recently, the paper is titled “Vampires in the Heartland” and you can find it by going to my tag. But anyway.

Vampires in literature are any selfish character. They destroy others for selfish reasons. In the case of this story, the tourist is a vampire on this young girl Willina. He does not literally suck her blood, but she does end up killing herself so maybe in a way he sucked the will to live out of her. Vampires can be found in a lot of stories. But they don’t always work, so you have to be careful. If someone is acting purely out of desire and not selfishness, they aren’t a vampire.

Tip #5: Plan Structure

Let’s get straight to the point here - the best way to give your paper good structure is to just word vomit all over the page. But organize it into paragraphs. Word vomit everything you need to say about one point or one piece of evidence, and keep that all in one paragraph. Once you’re done, move on to the next piece of evidence or point and do it all again. Just keep it all separate.

I have a few ideas on how you can stay organized this way, whether you prefer to type or write everything down first.

Typing - Use a Word document, or your preferred place to type (I love Scrivener) and put each major point that you use to support your thesis on its own separate page. Word vomit on each page, then go through page by page and organize what you did until each page has a paragraph for that particular point that includes all of the evidence you want it to have. Once you’ve done that for every point, you can start organizing them in the order you want. The way they all flow together the best from one point to the other. After they’re in the order you want them, you have to create transitions between each point/paragraph. This is always the trickiest part for me, but once you have everything in the best order it makes it a lot easier.

Writing - Use a notebook and do the same thing; put each point on its own page and word vomit on each page. Keep it all separate. Once that’s done, mold each page until they are paragraphs instead of word vomit all over the page (also don’t worry about being neat with the word vomit, just make sure you can read it). Then consider ripping out all of the pages and physically laying them out in front of you, that way you can sort them into the desired order. Then of course you have to create transitions between each point/paragraph.

If you are unsure about whether or not your points are in the best order, just hold tight...

Tip #6: Evidence/Points Order

Super basic advice here - decide what evidence is the strongest that supports your thesis and put that last. It’s easy to jump right in at the beginning out of excitement to talk about the best evidence you’ve ever found in your life that will make your thesis amazing and your paper a banger, but that leaves a very serious problem. What happens at the end, right before your conclusion? Your reader will be left disappointed. You got them all excited with that amazing evidence at the beginning, and left them hanging with the weakest evidence you had that really doesn’t do much. No. Leave them in amazement and put your best evidence last. Also a good reason to practice those structure processes I just talked about above.

Tip #7: Reevaluate Your Thesis

There’s a great chance that your thesis has somehow wound up in your conclusion. As you were writing, you probably got more and more excited and inspired and your mind created an amazing thesis and disguised it as a conclusion sentence. No. No. No. We’re not letting you get away with that. Hopefully you went ahead and waited until the end to do your introductory paragraph, because everyone knows those never hold up once you finished the rest of the paper, but in case you didn’t - go back and read it. Your thesis probably isn’t amazing anymore. Consider changing it.

Tip #8: Edit Forever

Up until now, you’ve just been writing your life away and organizing. Now, after you write your introductory paragraph (maybe before?), print out that paper and read it. It’s actually super important that you print it out to proofread it because our minds process it differently this way. You’ve been staring at it on the screen for a while now. Not only is your mind used to it, but our brains automatically skim things we read on screens. We read more thoroughly when things are in print. So print it out and proofread it. I recommend making marks in a color that’s NOT black, so it’s easier to see. And when you make a grammatical correction, circle it so there’s not a chance you’ll miss it when you go to fix it later.

Tip #9: Sentence Structure

Have you noticed that the rest of these tips are shorter? That’s because we’re almost done! But not yet.

You have limited space in this paper. You have a lot of points to make, and not a lot of room to do it. So you don’t have time for ramble-y sentences. Go through and get rid of those unnecessary words, like “that” (yes, 9 times out of 10 you actually don’t need the word). Where there are a lot of words where one will do, change it, but don’t do this so much that it doesn’t sound like you anymore. Your professor will notice if you sound like you have a PhD on paper and in person you couldn’t even tell them what half those words even mean. That doesn’t make you sound smart, it makes you look silly.

Also try to avoid going on long tangents in your paper. It can be hard, but try to notice them when you’re proofreading. Be concise in your sentences. Short, sweet, and to the point.

Tip #10: Double Check Citations

I’ll make a completely different post next week(ish) dedicated to citing literature papers. Until then, good luck.

Tip #11: YOUR Title

You didn’t think I’d forget to address the title of your own paper, did you? Gosh. The key here is to just know your professor. I know my professor loves puns, so I try to make my titles appropriately punny.

Here’s a secret - you actually aren’t allowed to just use the name of the story you’re writing about as the title of your paper. Annoying, right? Because that’s totally what I’d do if I could. You can use words from the title in your title. For example, the title of my paper of Karen Joy Fowler’s “Heartland” was “Vampires in the Heartland” but there’s a reason for this. The term “heartland” is actually what is used to describe the midwest, which is why it’s the name of the story. It’s used as a clue that this story takes place in Oz in Kansas, since that’s never explicitly stated in the story. There are just a ton of clues and hints dropped in that are meant to help you draw that conclusion. So I decided to use that in my title. And since my paper was about literary vampire imagery in this story, I settled with that name. My professor put a little heart next to it.

It’s fun to come up with punny names for your papers. Another example is my most recent paper, which was over a re-imagination of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale as a short story that demonstrated the history between Christianity and Paganism (my thesis statement for this is above). So for the title of that story I used “The Better to Preach to You With” which is actually super corny and I didn’t get a little heart next to it, but I almost got full points on the paper so she must’ve been fine with it.

You have to take the time to come up with a name, you might as well have fun with it.

That’s all I’ve got for now. I hope this was helpful. Feel free to add your own tips. Most of these are tips straight out of my literature professor’s mouth. Look for my post next week on citing a literature paper, which will be 100% tips by my professor. Of course every professor is different, but I’ve been using all of these tips on another literature professor of mine and she’s been good with them as well.

#haydenstudiesblog #english student #literature student #literature paper #english paper #literature paper tips #tips and tricks #studyblr #college #college student #college studyblr #student #english studyblr #literature studyblr

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afriedbreaddragonposts · 3 years

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Federal Class 9 Notes English Cha 2 Patriotism

Patriotism Federal Class 9 Notes English Cha 2, comprehension, grammar, Vocabulary, Writing skills, and summary fbise class 9th notes 2021.

Comprehension FBISE Notes Chapter 2 Patriotism

How will you define patriotism?Patriotism is defined as the love for the motherland and devotion to one's country. A patriot is ready to lose everything and is even ready to sacrifice his life for his country and nation.What are the qualities of a patriot?A patriot loves his country and is always willing to sacrifice everything for it. Sovereignty and integrity are the qualities of a true patriot for which no compromise can be made.As a citizen of Pakistan, what are your duties towards your country?As citizens of Pakistan, we must be loyal and honest to our country. We should obey all our national laws. We must live in peace with other citizens and work for the nation's progress.What makes us stay alert in the wake of foreign invasion?It is the passion of patriotism that makes us alert and active. We become active and alert when foreign countries plan to attack us.How will you elaborate on Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah's quote?"We must develop a sense of patriotism which galvanizes us all into one united and strong nation." Answer: Quaid's words mean that we must have strong feelings of love and devotion to our country. It makes us all a united and strong nation because we live and work for common aims and purposes.

Vocabulary Patriotism

Q.A) Guess the meaning of the following words. Confirm your meaning from the dictionary

Answer :

Q.B) Make as many words as from these roots words Examples :

Answer : Work - workshop - work hard - work together - worksheet - work permit - work place - work hours - work load - workaround - workbasket - work board - workbook - workbox - workday play- playground - play group - playbook - playmate - playful - playable - playact - play actor - play along - playback - play box - play day - playfellow - playfully - play group Q.C) Use the following words in sentences. - Sacrifice - Commendable - Prosperity - Invasion - Motherland - Responsible - Nationalism Answer: Sentence formation Sacrifice: Rashid Minhas sacrificed his life for the nation. Commendable: His effort to achieve A grade in the exams is commendable. Prosperity: Hard work brings the ultimate prosperity. Invasion: They built a fort to defend the town from any foreign invasion. Motherland: We should strive to become a true patriot and serve our motherland. Responsible: No one else but she, herself, is solely responsible for her failure. Nationalism: Th spirit of nationalism brings love for the country.

Grammar Patriotism

Q.A) Use appropriate modals to: 1) Describe your three abilities and capacities 2) Ask the teacher's permission for going out 3) Ask a friend to lend you a book 4) Express necessity to get up early 5) Express duty/obligation to follow traffic rules 6) Share some past habit

Answer: 1) Describe your three abilities and capacities - I can draw sketches. - I can swim well. - I can read Arabic and English with fluency. 2) Ask the teacher's permission for going out - May I go out of the class, please? 3) Ask a friend to lend you a book - Could you lend me your practical Physics book? 4) Express necessity to get up early - I must set my alarm as I always get up late. 5) Express duty/obligation to follow traffic rules - We should follow traffic rules to avoid accidents. 6) Share some past habit - I used to go out for a walk during my summer vacations. Q.B) Identify the kinds of the following sentences, (exclamatory, assertive, interrogative, negative, imperative) 1) Art is another subject in which I am particularly interested. 2) What a beautiful painting ! 3) Teach him to learn. 4) How would l know ? 5) She did not make a false statement. Answer: 1) Art is another subject in which I am particularly interested. Assertive 2) What a beautiful painting! Exclamatory 3) Teach him to learn. Imperative 4) How would l know? Interrogative 5) She did not make a false statement. Negative Q.C) Punctuate the following: captain muhammad sarwar major tufail muhammad major aziz bhatti pilot officer rashid minhas major muhammad akram major shabbir shaheed captain karnal sher khan and havaladar lalak jan all embraced martyrdom while fighting bravely for their motherland all of them were awarded nishan e haider the highest military award given to great patriots who lay down their lives for the country Answer: Captain Muhammad Sarwar, Major Tufail Muhammad, Major Aziz Bhatti, Pilot Officer Rashid Minhas, Major Muhammad Akram, Major Shabbir Shaheed, Captain Karnal Sher Khan, and Havaldar Lalak Jan - all embraced martyrdom while fighting bravely for their motherland. All of them were awarded Nishan e Haider, the highest military award given to great patriots who lay down their lives for the country.

Writing skills

Q.A) Summarize paragraph 4 of the lesson in three to four sentences. Answer: The spirit of patriotism makes us active and alert as we become careful when any other country plans to attack us. There are a number of instances of people sacrificing their lives for our country. During the wars of 1965 and 1971 and the Kargil War, many of our brave military officers and soldiers sacrificed their lives for the country. Q.B) Summarize the lesson in your own words. Answer: Summary The text is about the spirit of patriotism. It discusses the qualities of a patriot and how he sacrifices everything for the progress of a country. Patriotism means being loyal to one’s country. A true patriot is always willing to sacrifice his life for the defense of his country. A patriot will never compromise on the sovereignty and integrity of his country.Quaid e Azam was a great patriot and wanted to protect the Islamic culture in the subcontinent. It was he who gave Muslims a vision and achieved a separate homeland for them. The spirit of patriotism plays a vital role against foreign aggression. It makes us active and alert. There are a number of instances of people sacrificing their lives for our country. During the wars of 1965 and 1971 and the Kargil war, many of our brave military officers and soldiers sacrificed their lives for the country. The great patriots who embraced martyrdom were awarded the highest military award that is Nishan e Haider. Q.C) Which steps should we take to make our nation patriotic. Answer: We can inculcate the spirit of patriotism in our nation by teaching lessons and stories on patriotism through our syllabus of educational institutions. We should publish various articles and essays on newspapers and internet. We should present discussions on TV and radio about our national heroes. Moreover, parents should teach children the importance of being patriotic. Q.D) Write an essay on any one of our national heroes. (170 - 200 words) Answer: Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jannah was the architect of Pakistan. He was born on 25th December 1876. He fought sincerely and selflessly the battle of freedom for the Muslims and won in the long run. He received his early education in Karachi Mission School. Then, he was admitted in Sindh Madrasa-tul-Islam from where he passed his matriculation in 1895. Afterward, he went to England and took his Barrister's degree from Lincoln's Inn. After completing his education, he came back to India and started law-practice in Bombay. Those were the days of British rule and Indians were fighting for freedom. Quaid-e-Azam, as his nature was, could not lag in this sacred task and soon by his persistent devotion to duty, sincerity and enthusiasm came to the front row of the freedom fighters. He started his political career as a member of the Bombay Legislature. Then he joined Indian Nation Congress. When he realized that the Congress was a neo-Hindu body, he resigned and joined the All India Muslim League in 1922. He had been the greatest spokesman of the Indian Muslims for a separate state for them. By 1930 he became an undisputed leader of the Muslims. Soon he began to reorganize the Indian Muslim league all over India. People gave him the title of Quaid-e-Azam for his selfless services for the Muslim cause, freedom, and creation of Pakistan. Mr. Jinnah's integrity of character was beyond reproach. Gandhi called him 'an impossible man', for he would never compromise on principles. He stood like a rock against his opponents. He united the defeated groups of Muslims into a force to reckon with. From 1940 (The Year Of Pakistan Resolution) till his death on 11th September 1948, Quaid-e-Azam worked day and night for strengthening the Muslim League. It was due to his untiring efforts and wise leadership that Pakistan came into being. He was a great champion of freedom for the people of India, our national hero, and one of the greatest leaders in the world. His political career covers a very wide span of about half a century. This career is the most spotless one that the world has ever known. Even his enemies admit the integrity of his character. It is our duty as the true Pakistanis to follow his footsteps and work honestly for the solidarity and prosperity of Pakistan---the land of the Pak or 'the pious people'. Let us try to be 'pious' in the true sense. Let us uphold the biggest motto of our Quaid which is unity, faith, and discipline. Q.E) Write a short dialogue between a political activist and a teenager in which the political activist tries to make the teenager understand the importance of patriotism. Answer: Dialogue Teenager: Excuse me, sir! Can I have your attention, please? Political activist: Yes, sure why not, son. Teenager: Sir, I idealize our soldiers so much. What motivates them to sacrifice their lives for the honor of a country? Political activist: My son, it is patriotism that does wonders. Teenager: That’s great! But what patriotism is basically? Political activist: It’s the love of one's motherland and it's being loyal and true to one's nation. Teenager: Sir, what is the most important thing for becoming a true patriot? Political activist: Sovereignty, integrity, and honor of the country are the requisites for a patriot. Teenager: And, sir, is this what brought Muslims to strive for a separate homeland? Political activist: Yes, you have got the point. It was the spirit of patriotism that led them to the struggle towards a separate homeland. Teenager: Sir, is it confined to foreign aggression? Political activist: Not at all, it has no boundaries. It is needed in both war and peace. We can make Pakistan a prosperous nation through this spirit. Teenager: Thank you for this valuable information, sir. Political activist: You are welcome, my son. Read more: Fbise notes class 9 English Cha 1 The Saviour of Mankind Read the full article

#FBISE

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muzzmurray · 6 years

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year in fic review (2017)

You can find all of the fic mentioned below on my ao3 account, savedby. If you’re looking for my football fic edition, you can find it here.

Year at a glance: Total number of completed stories: 32 Total word count: 77707

Overall Thoughts:

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? I wrote way more than I realized for this fandom, um, wow. There were a couple of months where I was writing like four or five fics and I have no idea how that happened.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? Oh, the Vegas Golden Knights! Because when they signed two, I was joking around on twitter about how I could ship them now, and my friend was like ‘well, why don’t you’ and then that evolved into Sabaton and by extension into the Bold in Gold series, which was one of the most rewarding parts of my year for sure.

What’s your own favorite story of the year? these tornadoes are for you, which was Nick/Bob and written for the Cannon Fodder exchange. The combination of magic realism, humor and their general softness was really nice to write, and @frecklebombfic did a beautiful podfic of it.

Did you take any writing risks this year? Purely in terms of style, I wrote descent, in second person, which I know tends to polarize opinions. I love it, for whenever I want to write something that feels more immediate and intimate. I actually tried to rewrite it in third person, because the friend I was writing it for told me she wasn’t a big fan of second person, but it just wouldn’t work. It had to be written exactly as it is.

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year? I’d like to finish this chaptered Mcdrai magic AU fic that I’m working on and I’d like to continue writing the Vegas Golden Knights as their narrative unfolds, so the Bold in Gold series can become a sort of written history of the team and its fandom. Ambitious, but. We’ll see. I’m already working on the next part.

From my past year of writing, what was…

My best story of this year: armet. I think this was in the works the moment I realized that there was a possibility that Flower might go to Vegas and it ended up becoming exactly what I had hoped it would be.

My most popular story of this year: i still get jealous of your old boyfriends, judging by kudos, which is actually funny to me, because for the longest time I really hated what I wrote for that fic and I ended up posting it after having it written for a period of time.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: foundations, my Marleau/Thornton fic. I mean, it’s a niche pairing and a character study, so it’s probably as good as it’s going to get, but it’s basically peak me and my love for old men and their narratives.

Most fun story to write: world i can call mine , which was my Pod_together project with @frecklebombfic . Having her input on it was so essential (as it was in many of my fics this year) and I had such a fun time discussing Auston, Zach and Mitch, and poly with her. And her podfic ended up being perfect. It was just a great project.

Story with the single sexiest moment: Man, I don’t know, I’m an ace essentially floundering in the world of smut. But I did manage to post, like 4 explicit stories this year, which just goes to show you that you can be anything you set your mind to, kids. As it is, I’m nominating this line from wake me up come tomorrow

Oscar does, adds another finger only when he feels Adam completely relax into the first. He fingers him slow and easy, watching his face as it relaxes from discomfort to pleasure. Adam makes these noises too, cut off moans, helpless and involuntary. Oscar adds a third finger and he whines, high in his throat.

Most “holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story: circumstance, which I hadn’t realized was still posted on anon until right now. So I’m owning up to it, I suppose. I’m not ashamed of it, because it still makes me laugh a lot on re-read, but please heed the warnings.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: your morning cup, my Tim Horton character study. I didn’t even really know anything about him when I decided I was going to be writing this fic. But as I researched and wrote, the story ended up being one of the most important things I wrote this year.

Hardest story to write: something like hope was an exercise in frustration, until I figured out how to frame it with quotes from Pekka’s Players’ Tribune article.

Biggest disappointment: I don’t really post things I’m actually unhappy with.

Biggest surprise: I was most surprised by how well fandom received Sabaton, because I figured it was something so niche that only a few people would actually click on, but it became one of my most popular stories. I’m really grateful for that.

Highlights + Wrap-up:

Favorite Opening Lines (4):

From tomorrow is going to be pretty pawsome

Ryan is halfway through his breakfast when he hears his front door opening. It’s 9am and he’s not wearing pants, so if he’s going to be robbed, he’s pretty much defenceless, unless he pelts the robber with some granola.

What still gets me is how real this ship became as the season progressed.

From Sabaton

There’re a few things Vadim expects to see when he lands in Las Vegas. His new teammate holding up a big sign with his name on it, decorated with footballs and pucks and glitter, isn’t one of them.

Am I still prissy about how badly they treated Shippy? Yes. Absolutely.

From LXXXVII

Sidney Crosby isn’t high on the list of people that Vadim expects to see in the hotel bar in Pittsburgh before the Knights game against the Penguins, and yet, there he is. Crosby is wearing a pair of thick rimmed glasses and a hat, presumably as some sort of disguise. It only makes him stand out more.

He also seems to be getting closer, swapping stools whenever Vadim glances away, until they’re sitting elbow to elbow.

Ridiculous Sid is my favorite plot device and he was in full effect in this fic.

From your morning cup

Strictly speaking, there’s never been a hockey player called Tim Horton.

I just liked the way this commands attention when you read it. I think it when you have something so niche, you need the first paragraph to grab your attention, and I think I did well here.

Favorite Closing Lines (5):

From dust in your veins

Then, Geno pulls him into another kiss, desperate, his chest shaking under Sid’s hands and Sid thinks that maybe he won't have to separate them after all.

That he can have this – his heart beating rapid fire in his chest, and Geno’s steadying palms on the muscles of his back, and the ghost of ice above them both.

I love the removable heart AU (not to be confused with the escaping heart AU) because it just works so incredibly well for those sports narratives.

From knight

“You know, it’s actually a pun, because I used to play for the London Knights and-”

“Oh my god, please stop.”

From we were a house on fire

“I want.”

“It’s been years.”

“Want still.”

“...yeah, okay.”

“Like that?”

“Yeah. Just like that.”

I love how deceptively simple this is, with no dialogue tags, but it feels like it packs a lot of punch, cutting through the complexity of their situation.

From descent

The streets of Edmonton turn slick, coated with fallen snow. Daylight is scarce, and cold besides, and you wear a jersey that doesn’t mean much to you and you watch out for the boy that means everything.

At night your curl around Connor in your bed. He always runs hot, burning in your bones and warming you from the inside out.

He presses his mouth to the nape of your neck, and you blink, mind muddled with sleep, and you realize you don’t know which one of you is the one doing the protecting.

Ask me sometime about my thoughts about enforcers and their relationships with star players, and why end up romanticizing them so much.

From armet

“Fleuuuurrrryyyy,” the fans scream, without a hint of mocking, echoing off the concrete of the building, “Fleuuuurrrryyyyyyyy!” and it’s all he can do to smile through his tears, waving at these people who have crucified and martyred him over the years, but have loved him through it all.

His crease hasn’t changed. He pats the pipes, feels them steady beneath his palm, familiar. His teammates are all on the ice now, circling his goal, and he catches sight of Nealer coming forward with the puck. His face is grim and determined, and Flower remembers he’s got something to prove too.

He gives Nealer a sharp nod and crouches. Smiles.

He’s ready.

Flower’s game against the Pens in Vegas was emotionally devastating and I can only imagine how it’ll be when they play in Pittsburgh.

Favorite Lines From Anywhere (6):

From be your spine

The Bruins seem just fine without him, which is just a metaphor for his life, really. He notices the absence of Boston, but Boston is too big to notice he’s gone.

He limits his texts to Tuukka, and eventually they taper off, growing sparser and more impersonal as months go by. It’s understandable. Anton feels the absence of Tuukka like a phantom limb, but Tuukka is too brilliant, too beautiful, to be affected by Anton’s absence.

My first fic of the year was a homage to the journeyman player, the one who isn’t a star anywhere, the one that’s expendable. And this was one of the lines that summarized it pretty well.

From teddy bear

“I just want to be a cool dad, like Bozie! You’re the lame dad, Zach is the big brother figure and Leo is the grumpy grandpa. We all have roles to play!”

Matt bites back his first comment, and the second one. They’re both swearwords.

This whole sequence between Mo and Matt still makes me laugh really really hard.

From foundations

The Sharks are Joe’s team by virtue of wanting him more than anyone else did, but they aren’t his team like they’re Patty’s, who’s left pieces of himself in every crack in the Shark Tank concrete and who wears the jersey with more pride than anyone Joe’s ever known.

This fic hurts more now that Patty got traded.

From heart like a home

Roman is still sprawled across PK’s bed, entirely naked, reading one of PK’s magazines. His tanned skin glows in the soft yellow light of the bedside lamps. The sight never fails to make PK’s mouth go dry. As if sensing his gaze, Roman looks up, arching an elegant eyebrow, a stray curl falling across his forehead.

I want to eventually try to capture the various details of Roman/PK in a longer fic but for now this image of naked Roman will have to do.

From these tornadoes are for you

Bob is standing at the stove, muttering something to himself. He still looks like he did last night, little bolts of lightning racing across his skin, and when he turns around his eyes are still glowing pale in his face. It’s a little disconcerting, but Nick goes with it.

“What are you doing?” Nick asks, walking next to him to look at the pan and wincing. He’s careful not to touch Bob, doesn’t know what it’ll do to him. “Was this supposed to be scrambled eggs?”

I really enjoyed writing the whole scene of Bob releasing his magic in the woods, but what made me happiest to write was the morning after and how all that magic becomes somewhat of a hindrance.

From i still get jealous of your old boyfriends

“Are you telling me that Connor McDavid’s favorite show is My Super Sweet 16?” he asks incredulously. Mitch grins at him.

“Oh, no,” he says and Auston lets out a sigh of relief, “it used to be his favorite show. I think his favorite right now is Extreme Couponing.”

Connor and Extreme Couponing is the greatest love story I’ve written this year.

Fic Goals for 2017: I want to finish off the four WIPs that I didn’t manage to this year. Beyond that, I don’t have any particular expectations. I hope I can continue to enjoy writing in this fandom and that people will continue to enjoy my work.

year in fic review (2016)

#personal #writing

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studyessie · 7 years

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Yes, the infamous writing process that no one ever follows.

I'm sorry to say, there really is no other way. The biggest struggle with writing essays is being able to put jumbled up thoughts into one coherent piece of writing. That's why this masterpost isn't only going to tell you how to write your essay, but also how to organize it. There are many steps to writing an essay. If followed correctly, every essay will be executed perfectly.

1. P R E W R I T E

It is important to understand the prompt and the style of writing your teacher is looking for. Whether it may be argumentative, descriptive, or informative, the prompt should allow you to follow that type of writing. The best way to organize yourself is to create lists. And ohhh yes, I love my lists. When given a prompt, I suggest you write down multiple answers or possible topics you have for that prompt. Continuing this, jot down little subtopics for each of them. This is where you'll reach your "AHA" moment. Usually, there will be one that really sticks out and allows you to have a good range of things to talk about. This is the one you want to choose. If it's easy to brainstorm ideas from the beginning, it'll be fairly easy the rest of the way through.

2. O U T L I N E

Once you've chosen a solid topic to write about, go ahead and write an outline. There are numerous ways to do this so it really just depends on your preference. If you are unsure about it, try out different ones and figure out which one makes the process easiest for you. A couple of outlines that I use are the T/Melcon format, mind mapping, and clustering. The essence of creating an outline is so that once you finally begin writing, you should be able to use that outline to guide you through what to write next. That's why of all the outlines I've used, I prefer the T/Melcon format the most. It allows me to separate my intro, body, and conclusion paragraphs. As well as have the main topics and subtopics of each of those body paragraphs. Here is the basic outline that I follow:

Prompt: Introduction Paragraph: Gain Attention (GA): Thesis: Body Paragraph 1: Topic 1: Evidence 1: Explanation: Evidence 2: Explanation: Evidence 3(optional): Explanation: Concluding Sentence: Body Paragraph 2: Topic 2: *Same as B.P. 1 Body Paragraph 3: Topic 3: *Same as B.P. 1 *May have a Body Paragraph 4 (if needed), format same as others Conclusion Paragraph: Quick summary/Recap: Reiterate Thesis: Future Statement:

*Note: I never completely fill out my outlines. That would be way too stressful and truthfully a waist of time. I find that I always stray away from my outline once I actually start writing the essay because, every time without fail, new ideas will start to pop up that you will want to incorporate.

3. I N T R O D U C T I O N

Okay okay, I would never EVER in my life tell you to start with the introduction. Why? Because I absolutely hate writing them and it makes the entire writing process so much more stressful. Thinking about what that first word readers are going to see and how that affects the entire tone of your essay stresses me out to the max. Instead, I would say to have a rough thesis statement. Yea, that one sentence that is a requirement in every introduction. Start with a quick thesis about the three or four things you want to cover and move on to your body paragraphs.

4. B O D Y P A R A G R A P H S

This is where your outline is going to be most effective (if done correctly). I usually make sure I have all my facts/evidence pieces figured out and work through the explanations of each as I go along my essay. This is because I want my essay to flow well. The best way to do this is to connect your evidence to your theme/prompt and also introduce your next piece of evidence. Here's an example I took from a recent essay I wrote:

In “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” the author writes, “Race is a modern idea… The new idea of race helped explain why some people could be denied the rights and freedoms others took for granted,” (Rogow 4). When one uses the term the “human race” they are referring to humans as a whole. Yet this simple word has come to create many conflicts. This is because the perception of the word ‘race’ has been distorted somewhere along the way and has caused cultural relations to clash in the United States. To follow this, in “Sunday Dialogue: The Meaning of ‘Race’,” it is written that “all ‘racial’ classifications are inherently flawed, because they are based on the false idea of ‘race’,” (Sunday 1).

Rogow, Faith. “Race: The Power of an Illusion.” www-tc.pbs.org, 2003, https://www-tc.pbs.org/race/images/race-guide-lores.pdf. Accessed 23 Aug. 2017. “Sunday Dialogur: The Meaning of ‘Race’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 20 July 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-the-meaning-of-race.html. Accessed 23 Aug. 2017

*Notice how I mention the fact that the meaning of "race" has been distorted and how the following quote that introduces my next piece of evidence talks about the "inherently flawed" classifications of the word.

This can also be done for concluding statements. Summarize that body paragraph and quickly, and subtly, introduce the topic of the next paragraph. It doesn't need to be evident, but if the reader is reading actively, they should be able to spot it.

5. Conclusion Paragraph

The hardest part of the concluding paragraph for me is restating the thesis in a different way. Well what other way can I possibly say it in? This is where Thesaurus.com becomes your BEST FRIEND, YOUR LIFE LONG PAL. Trust me, he's the best. And no I did not just personify a website. If you're struggling to reword your thesis, don't feel ashamed in using a thesaurus. The best tip I can give you for writing your conclusion paragraph is to never write your last sentence as if it's the end of the road. As if the topic you wrote about ends there, fin, at the last word of your essay. Why? Because it really doesn't. Whether it's your current journey, a memory that happened long ago, or a current situation in society, IT'S STILL HAPPENING. It doesn't end because your essay says it does. Even if it's one of your most personal memories, that memory continues to impact you in your everyday life. Instead, write about the future. How it's going to affect you, how you wish your journey will continue, or the hopes you have for the future of the society.

6. B A C K T O T H A T I N T R O

Alrighty, so now that you have a much better idea of what your essay is really all about. Writing the intro should be easy. Depending on what exactly you wrote, you need to figure out the tone of your essay and how you're going to introduce that tone. Whether it be through a quote, and astonishing fact, or an anecdote, only you can make the best judgement of how you want your essay portrayed. Following this, go back to your thesis. Make sure you introduce every main topic of your body paragraphs and polish up the word choice. The vocabulary you choose also affects your tone and what readers can expect. The purpose of the thesis is exactly this. Make sure you're giving them an accurate idea. Don't make them picture something that your essay isn't about.

7. R E V I S E & E D I T

I SEE YOU. I KNOW YOU DIDN'T GO BACK AND READ YOUR ENTIRE ESSAY OVER AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN. Well guess what? I don't either. I know that by the end of it, you're beat. And the last thing you want to do is look for all the intricate grammar mistakes that you've probably made all over the place. If you want to avoid this, do yourself the favor of not waiting until the last day. This way, even if it's the second-to-last day before your essay is due, you still have one more day to go back over it and perfect it.

Hey there guys! This is it for this masterpost! Ahh it's been a minute, huh? This series should have been done since late August but here I am still finishing it. Oops. I'm slowly getting into the swing of things and have been focusing more on my time management. Between work and school, I still want to make sure my friends and this blog are apart of my priorities! I really hoped you guys enjoyed this masterpost as it took me longer to write than most. I've been writing this one for over a week but only because I'll visit it for ten minutes at a time lol. I'll stop ranting now but please expect more from my blog! I'm not gone yet :)

*Also BTS COMEBACK IS EXTREMELY RUDE AND I NEED SOMEONE TO TALK TO ABOUT IT

Don’t forget to check out the rest of this series here! This is the last of the series so I hope you guys enjoyed it :)

-much love, studyessie

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abadpoetwithdreams · 7 years

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Nirvana in Fire Episode 4 Reaction

I thought this would be a fast episode to recap/review, but no. It wasn’t. A LOT HAPPENS. Most importantly? This is the episode where we really, finally get introduced to Jing (and, in a way, to Lin Shu himself) and that whole scene is so important!!! Also there’s the subplot with the slave kids, and the threat of Ni Huang’s impending marriage, and now there’s a subplot TO that subplot about her being in danger from someone, PLUS we FINALLY learn what Lin Shu is ultimately trying to do here in the court, and aaaaaahh. So much goodness! I got a little misty-eyed, even? That’s how good it is. It doesn’t bode well for my poor emotions in later episodes. Will this show ever have a filler episode that I can summarize my reaction to in, like, a single paragraph??? I’m guessing not. But I’m okay with that because I’m enjoying it so much.

Back to this episode, episode 4, we start where we left off with the fight from last episode, with Jing Rui getting flung across a table by Baili Qi. The emperor intervenes and stops the fight before anyone (meaning poor Jing Rui) gets seriously hurt, but in the pause afterwards he notices that Chang Su (who DID manage to swallow all that tangerine without dying, I am very proud of him) is leaning over whispering in a smiling Ni Huang’s ear. So of course the Emperor demands to be let in on whatever secret is being told.

And how cute is the sight of Mei Chang Su and Ni Huang whispering mischievously to each other at the EMPEROR’S OWN TABLE, so to speak? The answer, my friend, is pretty dang cute. They look like they’ve reverted to being a couple of children together. Ni Huang’s so comfortable and close with him, it reeeeeally feels like she instinctively recognizes him and it’s like her brain is just waiting to catch up with her heart which is already making her treat him like a lifelong friend, even if she doesn’t consciously realize it yet. Then again, she seemed already so intrigued from the first instant she saw him … I really want to know what he was telling her; I don’t think he was telling her the stratagem he was about to put into play, because he did seem surprised when she caught on so fast, but he could have been acting so idk. Maybe he just told her to follow his lead. Or maybe he literally just told her what he tells the Emperor he was saying: that Baili Qi is a strong but badly-trained warrior who could undoubtedly be defeated by children.

(Chang Su acts embarrassed as he admits this but COME ON. He is LOVING it.)

The whole room gasps. This is a massive insult delivered by an honored guest in front of the most important people in the kingdom. They are electrified with horror, shocked amusement, and intrigue (and, in the case of Northern Yan’s group: outrage).

And Mei Chang Su, THIS TROLL, puts on his meek innocent face and is all “oh, no, I meant no offense at all, we are all friends here, my bad, it is just that I make mistakes like everyone else, I should really learn to think before I speak ohohohoho”

But the ambassador from Northern Yan is having none of it and demands Mei Chang Su produce some children to be slaughtered by Baili Qi right. Now.

(I feel insulted on poor Jing Rui’s behalf that his buddy Chang Su has basically just said to THE EMPEROR that a child could fight better than he just did, and he does actually look a little miffed here, but only briefly. He is a better person than me, this noble sword-boy.)

(Btw, this scene is a good example of how Chang Su has the SWEETEST smile when he wants to. It is an excellent distraction from his clever manipulation, which I can attest to personally because it distracts ME from paying close attention to what he’s saying, so I’m assuming it worked on everyone else in that hall, too.)

Chang Su says ok, but also he’d have to train the kids, PLUS the kids would have to be previously untrained, and Ni Huang catches on almost immediately and starts helping, the end result being that the two of them work together fiendishly well, dancing back and forth with their varying reasons for why the children they pick for the bout HAVE to be taken from the slaves in the palace–y'know, one of which is Ting Sheng from last episode. It’s about now that I started laughing because “oh no he isn'tttt” but yes: he totally is. Mei Chang Su is already setting things in motion to save the kid Prince Jing mysteriously cares about. Brazenly, in front of the Emperor and the entire court. With Meng surely sweating bullets the whole time as he stands beside the Emperor.

Also there’s a great moment when Chang Su pretends to be VERY contrite about suggesting some children could whip Baili Qi, almost to the point of being flustered, and he stammers out some thing about how it wouldn’t be fair to use kids already trained in martial arts, as that would be an unfair advantage to them, and the Northern Yan crew look like they’re going to have a fit and the rest of the hall busts up laughing (except for the Crown Prince who looks upset by this further insult to the foreign group, and for Prince Yu who just smirks like he’s impressed) and in the meantime Mei Chang Su stands there in the midst of this hurricane he created looking wholly innocent and clueless and ugh I LOVE HIM. HE’S THE WORST.

So Chang Su, with the help of his secret ally Meng, manages not only to get the Emperor’s permission to take three kids from the slave ranks to train them, but also gets permission to train them back in his own house, and is given five days to do so. He also hints that the kids might deserve, oh I don’t know, some kind of reward after they defeat Baili Qi? I SEE YOU, LIN SHU. I SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING.

Meng picks three kids at random, and Ting Sheng somehow happens to be one of them. Wow, what a craaaaaazy coincidence!

Later, Jing Rui voices concern about the kids’ chances because he is, y'know, sane, but Chang Su is unmoved. He says he is going to have them use a Towering Phantom technique? Sounds impressive. Jing Rui knows of this technique but has never seen it. Chang Su asks does Jing Rui not trust him? Jing Rui promptly replies that he DOES trust his friend, who is so clever and knows so much. It’s painful to hear him say so. Then Yu Jin chimes in by saying that everything must be ok because Chang Su clearly has a plan: if the kids defeat Baili Qi in this mock combat round, Baili Qi won’t have the gall to then say he has the right to fight Ni Huang. That’s a good point. I’m very impressed that Lin Shu is seemingly managing to kill two birds with one stone, here. Very good.

(Speaking of Yu Jin, slight sidetrack meta time: I’m writing this as I rewatch after making it to episode 16 and then stopping, so I have seen more of these boys than just four episodes’ worth. And this is one of the earliest telling moments I’ve noticed where Yu Jin seems to see Chang Su’s stratagems clearly. He doesn’t see any long term goal in them, but he’s good at seeing what’s going on in the moment. It seems to me like the reason why he notices more about what Su is doing when compared to Jing Rui, is that Jing Rui takes Chang Su’s friendship more for granted. They are already friends at the beginning of the show; Yu Jin begins the show eager to meet this legendarily cool pugilist leader, so he’s a bit more removed from Chang Su the person and more calibrated to view Chang Su the persona. Chang Su is just lucky that Yu Jin is such a happy puppy of a person who wants to see the best in people and so isn’t a suspicious sort, otherwise he would definitely have an edge when it comes to figuring out that Chang Su is such a devious plotter and has some dangerous long-term goals; he is too innocent, alas. I also get the feeling that Jing Rui is at a disadvantage here even though he is the more mature of the two simply because he’s grown up surrounded by not one but TWO doting families so he’s just? Used to being loved? (And yet still hasn’t gotten spoiled, bless him.) But being accustomed to being the center of attention/having a positive network around him blinds him to Chang Su’s machinations. Anyway. Yu Jin and Jing Rui are the Most Precious souls in this entire show so far and must be protected at all costs. I dread what’s undoubtedly coming for them. The show wouldn’t make them this Good for no reason.)

Meanwhile, best of friends Meng is assuring the Emperor that it is very possible that Su Zhe might know a secret technique that would enable children to defeat Baili Qi, and also says even if the kids lose it’s a win-win for the Emperor. He also says even if the kids lose, it “won’t be any worse than it is now.” The Emperor somehow finds that reassuring? I feel like insulting a rival nation’s champion, then losing to him in a fight brought about by the insult IS a situation that would be made worse by the loss, but maybe he figures he’ll just punish this random impertinent strategist if things go wrong and so therefore he, the Emperor, is fine no matter what. Whatever.

The next scene starts pretty randomly with one of the less important concubines crying because she has to light candles at the shrine for a dead Empress. Is dead Empress the current Emperor’s mother? I feel like it must be. Anyway she must have been an awful person if her ghost can scare this woman that badly.

Enter Jingmum!! Jingmum (not her name, alas, but I’m using it for clarification sake) offers to accompany and help her fellow woman because she is a good and wonderful person. How much influence did she have over Jing as he grew up? Because he seems like a fantastic guy, but as a concubine of the Emperor I don’t know how much freedom to just be a mom to her kid this woman had. I want to see what their relationship is like.

Oh, and the current Empress is the one punishing the sad concubine for something trivial like bad handwriting or somesuch. This is an interesting detail because until now the Emperor’s favourite concubine, Crown Prince’s mom, seemed much more obviously hateful. This shows the Empress is also definitely not a good person. It reminds me of how Yu scolded those sparring soldiers so harshly back in episode 2. Guess that’s where he learned it from?

“Your arms must be sore,” a way too kind and compassionate Jingmum says to her fellow concubine, after the latter lights some candles. If her arms are sore, she needs to do some lifting, my gosh. Then again, I suppose she doesn’t have anything to do in her life to strengthen her arms, but still. That’s pathetic. Jingmum even massages her arm as they walk out of the shrine together??? What a saint. She says she was trained in medicine before, so I guess that explains things. Have her take a look at Lin Shu, pls. I want him alive longer than two years ok? Make it so.

Thunder sounds and I’m immediately like “SAVE THE BEAUTIFUL DRESSES” but the two women have the same thought apparently and scurry under cover, much to my relief.

BUT THEN. Their run for cover puts them right outside a secluded room where they can overhear a conversation between some old woman and the most evil-looking handmaid I’ve ever seen in my entire life. This actress flat-out sneers every word, and it’s kind of funny. But the conversation itself isn’t funny: they’re talking about some kind of drug that “the Empress Dowager used on Princess Supreme Li Yang back then.” Um. WHAT?! Someone wants to use this drug on someone in secret, and these women are making the necessary arrangements.

Jingmum and weak-arm concubine hurry away before they are spotted, but that sounded REALLY SKEEVY. My suspicions are confirmed when weak-arm concubine, in major distress, tells Jingmum that this is an emergency: that drug they were talking about is basically a date rape drug that was used in the past on the Princess Supreme. Who, I am pretty sure, is one of Jing Rui’s moms???? (Ten episodes later I know that yes, this is Jing Rui’s mom.) WHAT IS HAPPENING. Nothing good, that is sure. Weak-arm asks Jingmum for advice, and Jingmum tells her to keep silent about what she heard. It’s better to play it safe in the palace and not meddle in secrets, she says. This is exactly he opposite of what Jing would say, I have no doubt. So he can’t have spent THAT much time with his mom: enough to inherit her goodness but not her subtlety, I think.

Back at Snow Cottage we are treated to a long montage of the slave children waving swords around with varying expressions of seriousness on their round faces. Fei Liu is doing all the work to train them, and I imagine he’s a brutal but effective teacher. Lin Shu is sitting nearby paying nearly zero attention; he trusts Fei Liu to get the job done. “Make them faster so I can be sure to win,” he instructs, and I’m pretty sure that’s all he needs to say for Fei Liu to do everything in his power to make these kids the fastest children under the sun. I am curious about why he is so very, very devoted to Lin Shu. They’re such an odd duo but so great together.

Lin Shu does start paying attention, however, when Ni Huang shows up for an unannounced visit. Surprise! As always, he looks momentarily stricken to see her, and I wonder if she realizes she frightens him, she seems like she’s always watching him very closely. She looks like she is pleased to have surprised him, but he covers his reaction almost instantly. Ni Huang is here to see the children’s formation they are practicing for herself, and she is very perceptive in her criticism of it as she walks alone with Chang Su afterwards. I love it whenever Ni Huang shows off how smart she is AND how skilled she is in warfare. She’s perfect. She asks if he maybe has something further planned, and he doesn’t answer, like he doesn’t trust himself to reply. Every time she shows how clever she is it’s like you can see that hidden Lin Shu in him fall in love with her all over again and it’s the WORST. Sidenote: Hu Ge has done amazing work in this show so far, but one of my favourite aspects of his portrayal is that you can so clearly tell when shades of Lin Shu are coming out–which is remarkable, when you think about it, because I still haven’t been introduced to Lin Shu. I still don’t know who he IS. And yet I do, because Hu Ge has such a clear understanding of who he is, he’s clueing me in even without that formal introduction, even without convenient flashbacks, or without ever talking about who he was before. He’s wonderful.

Chang Su finally promises he will do all he can to help Ni Huang out of her predicament (one of the few promises he makes that I 100% believe, lol), and she looks thoughtful.

“For some reason,” she confesses as she looks out at the garden, “I actually trust you.”

Lin Shu’s only reaction is a blink that covers a flinch, and it’s like you can see how glad her confession makes him before reality catches up to his relief and turns it all to pain, and then he just. Walks away. No bow, no farewell, nothing. Because he can’t handle this, and neither can I. Ni Huang watches him go, looking strangely triumphant. Point to Ni Huang, I think. She is DEFINITELY on to him.

That night, Jingmum stays up very late sewing some pouches. She’s planning something. The next day (presumably), the delightful grandmother is back!!!! I’m desperately hoping that this time she doesn’t break my heart. Right now she’s all happy because she’s admiring the nice smell of the pretty sachet she has; the other concubines present also have some. Crown Prince’s mom and the Empress are there, too. The grandmother, learning that Jingmum made the sachets, eagerly asks that she be invited into the hall. Apparently her status is so lowly she cannot visit the grandmother without permission?? That’s so unfair. I wonder if the Emperor’s displeasure with Jing is thus reflected onto Jing’s mother, or if she’s just always been a nobody.

(Sidenote: the Empress’ headdress is a MARVEL. It’s been a while since I’ve commented on costumes. That headdress might be my favourite costume piece of the episode. Either that, or Mei Chang Su’s cute white turtleneck thing.)

When Jingmum comes in, Princess Supreme Li Yang is there. She is so sweet? Jingmum offers her a gift of a sachet, too, but then uses that moment where she presses it into the Princess’ hand to squeeze her hand hard, and the Princess immediately knows something is up. This is a code of some kind, probably a “we need to talk” or something similar.

Grand Empress Dowager, meanwhile, has another memory time slip; she seems to think that Jingmum is new to the harem, and is still just as warm and kind to her, because she’s such a wonderful old lady.

And THEN THIS HAPPENS:

“After Consort Chen gave birth, she isn’t feeling very well. You are a medical maid. Since the Lin family sent you here, you must take good care of her.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa. As the grandmother says this, EVERYONE gets visibly nervous and the music gets very tense. There is no Consort Chen, the Empress says. She died a long time ago.

The poor old grandmother immediately is extremely distressed, and starts begging for her eldest grandson. What has happened to her eldest grandson? She cries. Nothing good, I think. Darn it, this old woman has punched me in the heart AGAIN. I will never trust a scene with her in it ever again, so help me. The various women flutter around trying to calm her, and order Jingmum out of the hall, saying this is her fault.

Okay: there is a LOT to unpack here. First: Consort Chen. I don’t know who she is, but clearly her death was NOT a natural one. It definitely had something to do with whatever went down twelve years ago. Second: the eldest grandson. I don’t know who he is? Maybe I’ve heard before, but not enough that I recognize his name. Presumably he was also part of that disaster. I’m assuming both he and his mom (?) were implicated in the same false treason that took down Lin Shu himself, because those women looked scared to hear those names brought up. Furthermore, if he was the eldest son, then I’m guessing that he was a main target in whatever plot went down. Third: the Lin family sent Jingmum? So she’s related to Lin Shu directly? (Aside: I know a bit more about how the various families are connected from where I am in ep16 now, but at the time I watched this I was a lot more up in the air.)

Later, Jingmum is visited by the Princess, who made up some excuse about a rash so she could visit the medically-skilled minor concubine. In truth, she’s just there because she got the signal earlier and wants to know why Jingmum wanted to talk. It’s a refreshing change to see Court women sneaking about for the sake of good, instead of because they’re wicked snakey people (looking at you, Crown Prince mom and Empress). Jingmum explains about what she overheard, and the Princess FREEZES. There’s a flashback, and oh my gosh. The princess was given the wine by HER OWN MOTHER???? WHO ARRANGED HER DAUGHTER’S DRUGGING TO ENABLE THE MARQUIS TO HAVE HIS WAY WITH HER???? THEREBY TRAPPING HER IN AN IMPOSSIBLE DILEMMA OF DISHONOR UNLESS SHE MARRIED HIM?? This is despicable. It’s horrific. And I feel horrible for both the Princess and for Jing Rui, who surely knows nothing of this, and ughhhhhhh. It’s so gross. HER OWN MOM.

Anyway, the Princess is first angry that this painful history is brought up, but when she realizes someone is in danger of suffering this fate today, she is first shocked and then turns all to steel. Jingmum tells her only she can save Ni Huang, who is surely the target of the unknown schemer. Many people are desperate to be allied to Ni Huang and her family via marriage right now. Somehow, they have to protect her.

Does Lin Shu know this is going on???? I can’t imagine how he would, but surely he won’t be kept in the dark for long.

Speaking of Lin Shu, the kids are still flailing around with their swords and they look more adept now. Chang Su congratulates them and they all grin back at him and it’s very cute. This has probably been the best week of their lives. Why is he so good with kids??? The cynic in me is like “because he’s good at manipulating people” but I like to think it’s the Lin Shu part of him, not the Chang Su, that connects with them. Anyway, Fei Liu is like an angry, jealous cat until Chang Su, somehow managing to keep a straight face, gives him a very deliberate compliment to mollify him.

And then: Jing is back! And never mind what I said earlier, HIS costume might be my favourite of the episode. Those strong, vibrant colors? That bright red belt? LOOKING GOOD, JING.

The children scamper off to play, but Ting Sheng pauses to smile shyly at Jing before he goes and I melt a little. Jing is here to check on the boy, but also to let Chang Su know he’s researched his background. Is it just me, or did Chang Su look a bit excited at that? He lights up a little at the prospect of finding out how well he’s duped Prince Jing. A little too well, as it turns out. Jing is particularly cutting as he says, funny story, he tends to be pretty ignorant of politics (heavily implying that politics is the Worst), but he has found out that Mei Chang Su is buddies with both the Crown Prince AND Prince Yu, isn’t that interesting? Coming from someone as forthright and firmly principled as Jing, this is a slap in the face. He somehow manages to even turn how he sips his tea into a diss. Chang Su definitely pauses here; I honestly think Lin Shu planned for this, but that he didn’t anticipate how much it would sting to have Jing think so little of him. He CLEARLY cares a lot about Jing’s opinion of him, which might prove problematic to his persona, I imagine. He says he’s not their friend, they just both want him as their ally, and Jing scoffs: surely the great Mei Chang Su didn’t come to the capitol NOT to try to seize power?

No, that is true, agrees Chang Su. He does want to help guide the next Emperor. Jing looks a little disappointed, but not surprised. He asks with pointed restraint whether Chang Su is going to support the Crown Prince or Prince Yu.

And this is the moment Lin Shu has been waiting for, for who knows how long–you can tell that this is a moment he has been longing for–he doesn’t want either of them. I’d like to choose you.

I did NOT see this coming, but the instant he said it I was like YESSSSSSSSSSS!!!!! He’s not just tearing down: he’s building up!! It’s not just about ruining the people he hates, he is going to beat them at their own game by raising up an Emperor HE wants!!!! Omg. Omg. So hyped. This revelation made me SO. HAPPY. Because it makes the stakes IMPOSSIBLY higher, and it also makes me love Lin Shu even more. Because this is solid confirmation that this isn’t just a revenge story, and I’m just ECSTATIC because this game Lin Shu is playing is also going to be soooooo much more complicated and multilayered than I had anticipated if Jing as Emperor is his end goal. He’s going to have to play the court like a fiddle, and omg I can’t wait to see him work. Plus, I WANT JING TO BE EMPEROR. So I am aaaaaaall in. This is the best reveal ever.

Jing, meanwhile, almost gets whiplash from how fast he turns to stare at the placidly smiling Chang Su. He looks absolutely dazed for a good few seconds, and it’s adorable–and then he bursts out laughing. This poor man.

He sits down and downs a cup of tea like it’s a shot, which made me laugh in the midst of my giddy excitement, ahahahaha, and then, slightly bitterly, Jing lays out plainly to this strategist just how impossible it is for him to reach the throne. His mother is of low rank, he has no noble family connections through her, he has no connections in the world of politics or in any of the various government ministries, he’s spent basically his entire adult life soldiering and so has no worthy connections there, he is not even a high-ranked prince himself even though he’s 31 because, oh yeah, his dad the current Emperor HATES HIM. So, good luck with that, Chang Su. Hearing Jing list all the ways he’s a (supposed) failure made me so sad. I know basically nothing about him as a person, but I know on instinct that he deserves so much better. Again: the acting is so good. Also the music. The Music starts up in this scene and it’s awesome.

Chang Su looks levelly at Jing. I know you are at a disadvantage, he says. But I have no other choice. And for just a second, he sounds DANGEROUS. It’s one of the few times so far, I think, that Lin Shu is speaking 100% honestly, no restraint or hiding behind masks, but pure INTENT, and the depth of the emotion he had in that one line was just–yes. Yes, do it. Take down those who wronged you, and work impossible wonders to get Jing made Emperor. DO IT. I BELIEVE IN YOU.

(Just … Do it without hurting Jing Rui?)

(Meanwhile, the Princess Supreme tries to visit Ni Huang but Ni Huang is away for the day. So much for that storyline for the moment.)

Back at the Snow Cottage, Chang Su tries to pour Jing more tea while explaining his plan, but Jing is stone-cold not having it–neither the tea, nor this conversation in general. I hate how distrustful he is, but it makes total sense from his point of view. Especially since he was connected to the Event™ somehow 12 yrs ago, if not politically then emotionally. Small wonder that he’s so distrustful and defensive! His continuing bad relationship with the Emperor has to stem from then, because he still believes that the people implicated were innocent. Ni Huang also thinks this, seemingly, but she’s more subtle about it so I guess she got a free pass. Jing comes across as a man who has grown accustomed to being always lonely and unable to trust anyone, let alone grow close to anyone, and it’s horrible even though I believe that the way he has frozen up is what has kept him alive this long, I, Claudius style–if the Crown Prince and Prince Yu thought him a threat, they’d surely have taken him out by now because he is not protected by the Emperor’s good opinion–or, well, by anything, come to think of it. Furthermore, his own father could easily interpret any semblance of ambition as treasonous? Because of his apparent sympathy to the people who died a dozen years earlier, it would be a very small logical leap for the already disapproving Emperor to make. His position in both the kingdom and his own family is terribly vulnerable and I can’t blame him for having adapted the way he has. But I don’t want him to be that way??? I want him to be happy. Gah. WHY CANT THE GOOD PEOPLE IN THIS SHOW JUST BE HAPPY.

(Sidenote: I wonder if he has any sort of subconscious recognition of Lin Shu like how Ni Huang has, but if it’s affecting him in an opposite way–making him even MORE guarded and hostile, instead of instinctively trusting this stranger. Based off the music cues and the acting, Lin Shu and Jing definitely have a Past. I’m eager to find out what that Past is, but also–I’m very scared. The more these two interact the worse I’m going to feel watching it, probably.)

Chang Su tells him he wants to support him simply because political success while backing such a hopeless candidate for the throne will make him, Chang Su, look even more impressive than he would if he worked with one of the other two Princes. Jing seems to believe that this selfish, ugly motive is the truth, which is good for Lin Shu’s goals and secret identity, but also–ughhhhhh. Jing also comments on how he cannot understand how people like Chang Su, who are obsessed with political manipulation and power grabs, think. Again–this is the WORST, because Lin Shu CLEARLY understands Jing really well. So presumably Jing would similarly understand Lin Shu if he knew who he was. But he doesn’t, so. Shu just keeps impaling himself on the sword of Jing’s scorn to coax the stubbornly righteous prince into working with him.

(Sidenote: Jing has THE most beautiful eyebrows. They’re so impressive. Truly worthy of gracing an Emperor. Crown Prince’s sad ‘stache shouldn’t stand a chance.)

Finally, Chang Su asks Jing plainly if he WANTS either of the other princes to take the throne. Jing is visibly upset by this and says essentially that if Chang Su is as great a strategist as everyone says, then he should know the answer to that already. Chang Su smiles and says of course he does: he IS the Divine Talent, after all. I still am amused that he even has that name for himself? But it seems to be well-earned, so go ahead and call yourself whatever you like, Chang Su. Does this mean we can say he actually has four names? Good grief.

Jing gets VERY intense and says that there’s no hope of the throne for himself, but he will do ANYTHING if the Divine Talent can prevent those other two from taking the throne. (Actually, hilariously, the subtitles on dramafever have him say he would “pay whatever prince it takes” but I’m assuming he’s actually meaning he’d pay any price, metaphorically speaking, not that he’d bribe any prince. Because that would kinda go against his whole character as established up to this point, so.)

Chang Su tells Jing that Ting Sheng’s freedom will be his first gift to him. If Jing accepts that gift, then they will be partners in this play for power. Jing is clearly conflicted over this, and soothes his uneasy conscience by telling Chang Su plainly that he does not like sneaky, manipulative people like this, so even if Chang Su does help him to the throne, Chang Su isn’t guaranteed any kind of fame or reward. Chang Su–who, again, looked ever so slightly hurt by Jing’s appraisal of his character–says that’s fine; there is time enough for negotiating rewards later. What really matters to him is how Jing’s temperament is different from the other two Princes’.

(Also, the music, you guys. THE MUSIC. WHY IS THE OST NOT ON ITUNES.)

We’ve never met, Jing tells him coldly. How could you know what my temperament is like? Oh, Prince Jing. I have only known you as long as the fake Mei Chang Su has, and even I know what your temperament is like. Also, did Shu slip in saying what he did, or was it planned? It felt spontaneous. He backs off the statement a little, changing tack and instead reminding Jing that if he doesn’t want the other two princes as Emperor, then Jing is the only other possible successor; no other prince is eligible. The scene ends there, but–I think Chang Su has got him. I think Jing is the type that he won’t be able to get those plainly presented facts out of his head, and he’ll talk himself into actually going for the throne just so he can stop his terrible brother’s. I don’t think Chang Su has to push him anymore, he just needed to plant that seed. I’m so excited.

Cut to Marquis Xie, who is apparently having his wife followed??? His wife, who he drugged and raped decades ago???? He can NOT get any worse, what a disgusting slug of a man. Unfortunately he seems like he’s also very clever. Unfortunate for Lin Shu’s scheming, that is; it’s very fortunate for the story because watching Shu work his magic wouldn’t be anywhere NEAR as compelling or as satisfying if he was just given a bunch of straw men opponents to knock down. Major kudos to the show (and, I’m assuming, the novel) for making basically everyone intelligent. A lot of times stories with brilliant protagonists just write everyone else as stupid so that the protagonist just seems smart; making EVERYONE smart is way harder to write, but the payoff is HUGE. Yes, Mei Chang Su does make some Sherlock-Holmes-esque leaps of logic sometimes that don’t NECESSARILY have to lead to what he concludes, but that being said it’s usually pretty solidly done, plus he has tripped up a couple times anyway, so he isn’t always right. I can live with a handful of convenient deductions when the narrative and emotional payoff is this good.

Anyway, back to what I was saying: Marquis Gross is having people follow his wife. He knows that she tried to visit Ni Huang and that she was not successful. I’m curious about WHY he is spying on her, though. Is he just a jealous husband? Or does he have spies tailing other people, too? I would have thought he’d have had Mei Chang Su followed by now, if that were the case.

Back at the Snow Cottage, Meng is peering at Ting Sheng while the boy sleeps. It’s not as creepy as it sounds. Also, I half expected Meng to accidentally drip candle wax on the kid’s face and wake him up, lolll. He nods at Chang Su like he’s confirming something, and once they are back at Chang Su’s tea table–an already iconic location in this show, tbh–he says something about are you sure that slave kid is Prince Qi’s son? And instantly I’m like ohhhhhhh, wait. Wait. Is Prince Qi the supposed leader of the fake rebellion, the dead grandson the old grandma Empress was crying about earlier?? The oldest prince????? Because of COURSE Jing would care about this boy, if so. But the Emperor can have no idea, I would think? Otherwise this boy would be dead, I’m prettttttttty certain.

Lin Shu lays all this out, and Meng admits the boy looks like the dead prince a lot. He then brightens and says, well, at least this shows the gods have a conscience! The look on Lin Shu’s face when Meng says that–somehow, I reeeeeeally doubt he feels the same, lol. Again, Meng asks what happened 12 years ago and how Lin Shu survived, what horrors has he had to go through, to be here alive but apparently 100% transformed? Once again, Shu sidesteps this question. Once again, I am incredibly frustrated. He says the only thing about his survival that matters is that he will not let this life he’s managed to cling to go to waste.

Then we cut to Ni Huang sitting in what I assume is her manor? Her armor and campaign map are on display in the background anyway, nice touch. She’s reading something. Her brother comes in and asks about the children’s chances against Baili Qi (oh yeah, almost forgot about him after that Jing-Shu talk scene) and Ni Huang doesn’t seem like she was that impressed. Her brother is instantly upset and starts to march over to Chang Su’s house in the MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT (I love this brash kid) but Ni Huang sharply forbids him. She reminds him, too, that just because the kids might not defeat Baili Qi doesn’t mean SHE can’t. I totally believe Ni Huang could take him, because I want to believe in her. She’s amazing.

Back to the Snow Cottage, Meng is aghast at the notion of Jing vying for the throne. He’s definitely worried that this plan will get Jing killed. Heck, IM worried about the same thing! But Lin Shu has an answer–a terrible, terrifying, heartbreaking answer:

Doesn’t he still have me? Leave all those despicable and ruthless tactics to me. If we are to overthrow those evil villains, the innocent are bound to be hurt. At times, we might even have to be ruthless to them. If Prince Jing can’t bear to inflict such pain, I will.

There is a LOT to unpack from this little speech (once I stop sniffling and blink these drafted tears from my eyes). Firstly! Lin Shu knows how Jing is limited by his morals and principles AND HE DOES NOT WANT TO CHANGE THAT. He is not setting out to make Jing into a more ruthless person; he needs Jing to stay, well, Jing, if he is going to succeed in putting a Good Emperor on the throne. Secondly!! STAY AWAY FROM JING RUI AND YU JIN. It seems my instincts that Mei Chang Su somehow befriended Jing Rui for ulterior motives is were correct, ughhhhh. Thirdly!!! This speech comes RIGHT on the heels of his previous statement that never mind what horrific suffering he has endured; the important thing is that he is alive and thus he must not waste his life. This plan of his seems more and more like a sacrificial suicide of both body and soul; he knows he doesn’t have long to live (according to his conversation in episode 1), and so he risks what little time he has left by going back to the capitol and exerting himself far beyond what I imagine is safe, both mentally and physically. Not only that, but he knows good, upright Jing would never stoop to the underhanded machinations necessary to win the throne on his own, so here comes Lin Shu willing to sacrifice his own sense of righteousness to keep Jing Good as well as to make him win. We’ve had enough clues now that I really, really, REALLY don’t think this scheming and manipulating and cold calculatory nature is something that is actually natural to our sickly avenger. It is simply that in his mind the end goal justifies any means, ANY AT ALL, and that includes not only hurting innocents, but also hurting himself. Before Lin Shu throws any innocent or good person to the wolves for the sake of Jing’s success, he is throwing his own self away. Before his body perishes, he is already attempting this suicide of self: now that he has his life, he has to make sure it is not wasted. He exists only to get his vengeance and to eradicate the corruption in his family and the government that essentially cost him his life all those years ago, and this means he exists only to use himself up as a sacrifice to ensure Jing wins this harrowing political game. Meng has commented repeatedly on how this Lin Shu is physically changed. He is trying to hold to an equally drastic mental change. In light of this revelation, all of his scenes with Ni Huang, who is subconsciously drawn to the Lin Shu that’s still in there, are made approximately 500% more painful. UGHHHH.

I’m still not over this scene; I might never be over this scene; but I have to move on, so now we cut to the Princess, Jing Rui’s mom. She tells her maids to cover for her and then makes a spectacularly conspicuous escape from her rooms, heading to the cottage where Mei Chang Su is staying. Seriously, she is still in her fine silks, she’s carrying a lantern larger than her head; all she did was cover her hair with a lovely hood. I don’t know where her husband’s spies are right now? But they should be fired.

But somehow she sneaks successfully to Chang Su’s door. He looks surprised, but lets her in for a chat after Meng stealths away. She’s come to tell him about the plot she was told about to drug Ni Huang. He asks can’t she put a stop to this without his help? This poor woman looks decidedly bitter as she tells him that her high rank as Princess Supreme really isn’t much use. She can’t do anything herself for fear that her husband and children will be implicated, and she doesn’t have anyone to accuse anyway. Chang Su assures her he will help. I really like this woman; I don’t have her name down yet. Li Yang? Something like that. She’s so pretty and her voice is so distinct, and I feel so badly for her. And how brave she is to take this risk in the hopes of saving Ni Huang from what happened to her!

But uh-oh, there’s trouble: the Marquis is on his way to his wife’s empty room. The Princess Supreme’s maids panic, until this utterly fantastic old maid (or governess, of somesuch? An old servant who knows how to play people just as well as Mei Chang Su, anyway) takes the situation in hand. She tells the Marquis his wife doesn’t want visitors. When he protests that but it’s him, though! She responds with oh, his wife ESPECIALLY doesn’t want to see him. Something happened with grandmother Empress today and she saw a room in the palace that reminded her of something that happened a long time ago, soooo …

This scene was brilliant. He backs down SO fast–and almost looks ashamed??? Too little, too late, you horrid man. I have no sympathy for him at all. But as a result of his guilty response (which includes him exhorting the old woman to make sure his wife is well-cared for and then him walking away comically FAST) the Princess Supreme’s late-night visit remains a secret, and she herself remains safe. Or as safe as she can be while living under that villain’s roof. Take out the Marquis, Lin Shu, do it, do it now!!

Chang Su walks the Princess Supreme out of his house to be polite, looking very calm, but the instant she’s gone his smile drops and he runs–or the closest we’ve ever seen him run, lolllll this poor invalid man–back into his cottage. Meng comes out of whatever cupboard he was hiding in (hey–where was Fei Liu this whole time? I just realized he was absent) and is like who could possibly want to drug Ni Huang???? Lin Shu, very deep in thought, says it has to be either the Empress or the favored Consort, the Crown Prince’s mother. And he says they won’t know which it is until one of them summons Ni Huang to the palace.

Aaaaand, end episode! Hoo boy, a LOT happened in this one, and again–it was all really important! Except for the boys training, I mean it’s important that they ARE training but those were the only scenes I felt like I didn’t have to pay attention to reaaaaal closely. Jing moves further into the foreground of the action in a big way, and we FINALLY get inside Lin Shu’s head a little as he shares at least a major part of what his endgame is. The stakes are sky high, everyone, and I worry that he’s not going to be able to handle what must be an immense amount of stress that will only worsen as things progress. He’s already having a hard time around Ni Huang, and he hasn’t been in court very long. Also, this cliffhanger is the most intense one yet, because it involves Ni Huang’s safety. I agree with the Princess Supreme that Ni Huang is clever enough to keep herself safe once she’s tipped off, so I hope Chang Su really can warn her at the palace fight! Too bad she can’t just punch the Empress or the Consort in the face, or something. That would be satisfying.

Next up: Episode 5! Hopefully I can get the post written and posted before my plane flight on Sunday. Also, I have a dance competition on Saturday, so really I would have to finish episode 5’s post by Friday to be able to post it before sometime late Sunday … I will try, but I can’t promise for sure.

Also! Sunday marks the beginning of my 10-day tour of Okinawa, which means my updates here will largely rely upon when I can find wifi. Adjust your expectations accordingly and just be prepared for my replies to comments and asks to be less prompt for a few days. And thanks again, guys, for making this viewing experience such a fun one, despite me putting off watching the show for about two years now? I only started writing these episode reactions/recaps for a couple individuals who specifically asked to know my thoughts, and I never expected there would be more of you out there who would be reading along, too, considering the show ended so long ago! Being able to chat with you all is really enhancing my first-time viewing experience, so thanks for that ^_^

#nirvana in fire #badpoet watches nif #badpoet watches #nif response ep4 #long post #cdramas

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leac92 · 5 years

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Journal #6 02/24/2019

For this week’s session in 6400, we focused a bit more on our writing drafts for the graduate fellowship competition. This week, I was not able to make much progress on my animation due to my struggles with my 3D animation course where we are creating a rig and blend shapes, a task that is still difficult for me to do. So for this journal, I will share some things I learned in my narrative theory course that relates back to my potential theory topic, as well as my progress on my graduate fellowship writing draft.

Approach

For the narrative theory course, we had to write two essays. One as an short analytical essay and the other a statement of understanding. Here were the guidelines for the analytical essay:

“This assignment has two parts: (1) select a segment of one of the narratives on our syllabus that we have not spent a lot of time discussing in class and do a rhetorical reading of that segment; (2) follow that analysis with a short discussion of what the close reading taught you about rhetorical theory—how it helped and/or how it inhibited your analysis.“

The second paper dealt with the understanding narrative ethics, what the medical field is doing now with that understanding and what are the best ways to solve problems with patients using the methods of narrative ethics and narrative medicine. Though, I’m still a bit confused about narrative ethics, these are just some ideas to help me understand other ways of approaching my animation narrative (such as, what kind of narrative am I aiming for? Who is my intended audience? Do I want this to help others on a mental level? Physical level?) Here are the guidelines for the second paper:

“Think of this assignment as an extension of Rita Charon's emphasis on the relation between close reading and attentive listening. Here the reading and listening are directed not toward a literary text but rather toward a critical text: Chapter 5 of The Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine, "Deliver Us from Certainty: Training for Narrative Ethics." And here I offer you a more systematic protocol (see below) to guide your reading and listening. Your task is to follow that protocol in order to write a one-page (single-spaced) statement of your understanding of the Chapter.”

On Reconstructing Critical Arguments

The assumption of this analytic practice is that understanding a critical argument involves more than identifying and remembering someone's thesis because arguments develop in response to questions and ongoing dialogues, by means of methods of reasoning, employing certain assumptions and principles, for certain purposes. By identifying these parts of an argument, one in effect reconstructs a critic's general framework--whether the critic is conscious of employing that framework or not. The reconstruction, then, has the following parts.

Question/Problem. What is the central issue driving the inquiry? What is taken for granted and what is up for grabs? Sometimes the problem will be identified explicitly in the first couple of paragraphs--but not always.

In, say, Stanley Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum," the question isn't really clear until you've read the whole piece. At the beginning it looks like he's asking, "why is the commentary in the Milton Variorum inadequate?"; but after reading the whole thing, one can see that this question is subsumed by something like, "how do my disagreements with the Variorumcommentators reveal the underlying structure of literary interpretation?"

The Answer. The thesis or “paraphrasable argument,” which may or may not be stated explicitly in the essay. The answer can generally be summarized in a sentence or two--and it should be put in terms of the question. For Fish's essay, something like "These disagreements reveal that all interpretation is actually a process of writing rather than reading. Our interpretive assumptions cause us to ascribe to the text those properties our interpretive strategies are designed to handle. Different interpretive communities have different assumptions and different strategies for ascribing those meanings, so interpretive disagreement can never be resolved by appealing to the text."

Method. This part of the reconstruction has two components: A. the organization and progression of the essay's argument. What are the steps of the argument and how do they relate to each other? What is the controlling logic that governs the choice of just these steps in this particular order? The striking methodological choice in Fish's essay on the Variorum is the switch from the argument for "affective stylistics" to the argument for the theory of interpretive communities. Fish starts with the case for affective stylistics because he wants to show how seductive the logic of any one interpretive community looks from the inside (perhaps--the point is that this question of method needs to be addressed).

The kinds of reasoning employed. One of Fish's main strategies is to divide and conquer. He characteristically posits two alternatives on an issue, makes one look bad, and then argues for the other.

Principles and Assumptions. The theoretical underpinnings of the argument, either explicit or implicit. Fish believes, in his affective stylistics mode, that the process of making meaning is the meaning. In his interpretive community mode, he maintains, among other things, that there are no facts independent of our perceptions, that only so many interpretive communities can be authorized at one time, that it is possible to escape one's commitments sufficiently to see how other people's commitments work.

Dialogics. What discourses is the essay seeking to respond to? And is the dialogical stance one of “No” (my predecessors got it wrong), “Yes, but” (there’s partial truth in their work, but they got some key things wrong), or “Yes, and” (they did some excellent work that provides the foundation for me to build on it in these ways.) l Fish, at this point, is most concerned with the traditional formalist view that meaning lies in the text, and he is saying “No” to it (even “No! In Thunder!”). He is also, interestingly, in dialogue with an earlier version of himself, and, toward the end of the essay, in dialogue with general discussions about intentionality and about the relations between percepts and concepts.

Purpose. The larger point or significance of the essay, the answer to the “so what?” question. The purpose can often be expressed in a form such as this: “In light of this argument, the critical conversation should change in the following ways.” In Fish's case, his purpose is to lay the groundwork for a new explanation of how interpretation works, by giving a new account of the relations among critical frameworks and primary texts.

Choices Made

Based on these guidelines for the analytical paper, I decided to choose Aristotle’s “Poetics”. I tried to break down chapter’s 1-4 and how I felt it relates to my understanding of narrative theory. Here is what I wrote:

Analytical Essay

I decided to read more upon Aristotle’s “Poetics” because the first time we discussed the book in class the first time, I’ll be completely honest, I had no idea what was going on, nor did I really understand the book. So, I decided to read a segment of the book (chapters 1-4) about imitation and found this segment to be somewhat related to my thesis topic of embodied experience. Chapters 1-4 seemed to focus heavily on imitation of narrative, rather, it be poetics, visuals, dance, music, etc. and how the imitation of art differs from the perspective of the one doing the imitation. For chapter 1, it seemed like Aristotle went on to discuss narrative in different forms and how, used upon the capacity of said form, can we create stories which imitate that which we are trying to pursue (in which case imitation of rhythm, speech and harmony (pg. 19))? I was a bit confused when he began naming writers such as Sophron (sadly, I had to look him up because I had no idea what he was talking about) and Xenarchus. Aristotle also goes on to discuss stories as elegiac poets or one-line poems. I was a bit confused when Aristotle discussed the term “latter” and “meter”. When researching the term “meter”, it meant a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that define the rhythm of some poetry. Hearing the rhythm of a words in a poem create a sort of imitation of emotions based on the word and what it describes. Going into chapter 2, it seems as if Aristotle discusses imitation of status, stating “Since those doing the imitating imitate people acting, and it is necessary that the latter be people either of serious moral stature or of a low sort (for states of character pretty much always follow these sorts of line, since all states of character differ in vice and virtue), they imitate either those better than we are or worse, or else of our sort, just as painters do. For polyglots used to make images of superior people, Pauson of inferior, and Dionysius of those like us.”(pg.21) Reading this segment of the chapter, I found it as an insight to how people try and compare their life, skills, etc. with others because of this idea society has created to divide us based on social status, wealth, and how much we have. We imitate what we wish we had in order to feel a sense of completeness and accomplishment. Chapter 3 seems to focus on imitation of the other two chapter; imitation of narrative and imitation of status. How people imitate performances of actors, which could also be interpreted as a kinesthetic empathy, or the ability to experience empathy by observing the movements of another person. Chapter 4 was the most interesting and most relatable to what I’m researching for my thesis. One segment state, “For imitating is co-natural with human beings from childhood, and in this they differ from the other animals because they are the most imitative and produce their first acts of understanding by means of imitation; also, all human beings delight in imitations.” (Pg. 22) This brings me to an idea discussed by Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, about the term “aura”, which questions the ideas of authenticity and of a work of art in regard to the actual object in reality. How an artist may imitate that object, however, it would be considered a technical reproduction and the idea of authenticity cannot exist. I know I might be going on a tangent with this, but I find it interesting to think that although we imitate life, it cannot truly be replicated in terms of authenticity. I believe this to be the same with people. We can imitate others around us (movements, status, etc.), but at the end of the day, you cannot be that person, you can only get so far as empathizing with that person due to us imitating them. In terms of my thesis, I want to create an embodied experience or focusing a relation between one’s own body to that of another boy. To imitate through visual interpretation and narrative.

Reading these chapters, I have come to understand that rhetoric theory is more than just words, it is a language of performance, rhythm, sound, art and speech. Though I’m still a bit confused on rhetoric in general, it seems as though the use of rhetoric is a technique used to persuade through speaking or writing using certain language techniques. So, in terms of reading chapters 1-4, I found imitation is a way to use this theory, specifically in imitation of status and narrative. It also seems to deal with a relationship of a given action and executing that with an action that contrast with the given action. Such examples include “Close Call”, where the main character almost dies on several accounts, but somehow survives, only to be haunted by one death he does not witness himself, rather, his encounter with the victim causes him to feel this way. Also going back to Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura, you can draw a realistic object, but it will never exist as authentic or “real” because it is merely a replica of reality.

This had some relation to my idea of embodied experience because these chapters seemed to focus on the subject of imitation and how we as humans imitate subjects that we find suitable in expressing ourselves and emotions. This can be in words, movement, music, art, etc. That we are merely expressing reality through means of narrative form.

For the second paper, I read Rita Charon’s The Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine, "Deliver Us from Certainty: Training for Narrative Ethics." and responded with this statement:

Statement of Understanding

It was around summer of 2015 when I began noticing changes in my health. I struggled to run, some things I ate, it made me nauseous. I had the urge to use the bathroom more and more. Come July through August, I began feeling light headed at work, even the customers asked if I was ok. Blood. For the most part, that’s mostly what I remember from that time, was how much blood I’d lost within a month’s time. Got so bad I ended up in the emergency a few times. They finally decided to perform a colonoscopy, as I grew weaker, lost weight because I couldn’t eat. The procedure was unsuccessful, as the inflammation of my colon was too high. Around this time, I’d say about September of 2015, I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, or U.C. for short, is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that causes inflammation in the digestive tract. The symptoms had become so severe at this point, the level of blood I lost would have killed me had I not received a blood transfusion. I think one of the first things running through my mind at this time were, “why did this happen to me? Am can this be cured? Will I need a colposcopy bag?” This was a narrative of a new chapter in my life, something I’m still coming to terms with even after 3 years after the diagnosis. But it’s a story I want others to hear, as well as myself, because it’s a reminder that I am here, I am alive, I made it here for a reason and that I will be ok.

Arthur Frank proposes from Ricoeur’s ideas that “our very selves are perpetually recreated in stories. Stories do not simply describe the self: they are the self’s medium of being.” “Narrative account of oneself –autobiography, memoir, psychoanalytic transactions, clinical accounts, dreams, that which one tells oneself in secret, or casual tales one tells to friends–not only report one’s narrative identity but, more radically, create that which is experienced as the “self.”” (pg.110) Narrative exist from the experience of the one telling them, rather it be in a nonfiction way or in a fictitious view where reality and our imagination collide, it gives us some purpose. Not all the time, but it’s a way to organize our train of thought and recollect a moment or memory from a lifetime of memories. From my perspective of chapter 5, the question that seems to arise is, how can narrative medicine or a narrative assist with one’s situation in terms of, not much of an acceptance of situations, but rather understand of oneself and create stories that, instead give us information on a disease or issue, but rather about the patient as a whole? To understand a person is to understand the situation. Not everyone has the same issue/problem, so, understanding an someone on an individual level could help find the underlying issues that may cause patient’s issues such as death, change in lifestyle, etc. Consider narrative ethics, which is described as way of thinking about a particular patient’s situation instead of trying to fit sanctioned theories or rules to the individual case (pg.119). Within this idea, stories seem to be a way to say we’ve existed in this world and experienced things in which others have not. To create an embodied experience for others through words, visuals, movements, etc. To show their existence has/had meaning for themselves or to the world. For medical narrative, it’s a way to accept/acknowledge one’s life or situation in which that person feels they cannot escape fate. A way to escape the mind’s idea of an end, rather than a beginning. For example, as I described before, I was diagnosed with U.C. I thought this was the beginning of a painful journey. I thought my life would never be normal again (found out it never was). I would never have a normal love life and I could die from this disease, not only from my organs, but as a person in general. That this disease would be who I am, and I would no longer be me. I felt I would not escape that fate.

Based on our discussion of the chapter for Charon, I was able to come up with an answer for the principles and assumption part of the guidelines, but was not able to come up with an answer for the “Answer” and “Method” part of the guidelines, mainly because I am not familiar with the understanding of narrative ethics just yet and how to explain that in words.

After writing these, I wrote the graduate fellowship draft, and again, I only accomplished writing one part of the requirements. here is the first draft of the fellowship:

Grad Fellowship Draft

Animation is such a broad subject, trying to find out what it means, and its usage could go in to so many threads and discussions. The question now is, what does animation mean to me? What’s its purpose? Who am I directing my vision to? Who is my intended audience? What am I trying to gain? So many questions with not enough time to answer all, but enough to get my point across in terms of my own experiences in animation. Animation is a concept that has yet to be fully develop and continues to progress in areas such as film, VR, AR, health, and other forms of art. It’s aesthetically pleasing, empathetic, sympathetic, nostalgic, informative, educational. Animation to me is experience, an opportunity for others to experience myself through movement, emotions enabled the characters and even the environment that evokes the character’s moves and reactions. As stated in the Understanding Animation by Paul Wells, before the 1970s theorists essentially determined the audience as a subject, and not as a set of undifferentiated individuals and, thus, engaged with the idea of cinema as an ideological apparatus; and one which created certain structures of address which demanded than an audience recognize and participate in certain narrational codes and conventions informed by a number of discourses (i.e. political, representational, psychoanalytical etc.).[i] Based upon these ideas and theories, their focus counted for only one generalized audience member.

My goal is to expand the conversation involving animation as means to evoke eidetic memories, an ability to recall images from memory vividly after only a few instances of exposure of certain experiences from one’s past. This will be evoked by the idea of intercorporeality, or focusing on the relation between one’s bodily action (character) and that of another (audience). This in hopes to elicit a response from the audience depending on individual past experiences. Society cannot be defined by one idea of experience because of our individual thoughts and ideas, which include memories. When I think of memories, I think of past experiences, good or bad, that have culminated our growth into who we are today. However, over time, those memories are fragmented and skewed, which can easily be altered based upon the discourse of our development as we grow older. Now, this is just an assumption based on my own experiences and memories, however with this idea, I wish to prove, to some extent, that animation can bring forth a method to unlock fragment memories rather than skew them even further than they might possibly be. (NEEDS WORK)

Hand-drawn animation is a process which requires the artist to embodied themselves into the animation in order to understand the characters, environment, and the experiences the character develops within the narrative of the animation. The story of my project is based upon my own experiences of struggling with finding my identity as animator and if animation is the career path I wish to pursue. The story follows my past experiences and what caused my reluctant approach on this path, as well as my lack of confidence in my work and myself. I began the drafting stages of the animation, which focuses on the movement, camera motion and layout of the environment. (NEEDS WORK)

The focus of the project relates mostly to community (still thinking of the reason involving diverse relations, family, environment, community involving school, friends, cowrokers)

Bibliography

[i] Wells, Paul. 1998. Pg. 222 Understanding animation.

Current Questions/ Next Steps

As stated previously, some questions I had in order for me to take the next steps in my research is, “what kind of narrative am I aiming for? Who is my intended audience? Do I want this to help others on a mental level? Physical level?” For my fellowship draft, some questions I need to consider are, “how will my project impact the community? Who is my intended audience in the community? What needs to be in my paper in terms of information about my project? How can I engage the reader about my project without boring them or confusing them about my approach?” I suppose my next steps would be to re-evaluate the structure of my paper, as well as my approach to my animation and figure out how my idea of embodied experience reflects on the animation and if the audience will respond to the film the same way I imagine them to (somewhat imitation approach).

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literastudy · 7 years

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Hello everyone! As a 2nd year B.A. student majoring in literature, I thought I would give some tips to other people about essay writing in a literary context, especially for stuff other than the outlines, as a lot of studyblrs already give very good tips about outlines. I am available to answer any question you may have about this guide, so please don’t hesitate! This guide will be a step-by-step walkthrough on how to prepare and write literary essays. Find the second part about actually writing your essay here.

1. master your subject

Before you even look into your essay question(s), you need to make sure that you have a good overall understanding of the work you are about to analyze. The first step is, of course, to make sure that you have read the piece in question. But there’s more! Here are a couple of guiding questions to insure that you have a good understanding of the piece:

What are the main themes and subjects of this piece? How do they relate to each other?

Who is/are the main character(s)? What motivates them, what are their goals? What makes them relatable (if they are)? How realistic and/or complex are they? How does their complexity/realism reflect their symbolic purpose in the work, if they have one? Are they one-dimensional allegorical figures or more like actual people? What does this suggest about the world represented in the book?

What are the characters’ relationships with each other? Who are the friends and who are the foes of the main character(s)? Are those friendly or hostile feelings mutual or one-sided? What does it say about the characters?

If the piece follows a standard narrative structure, what is the narrative scheme? What are the issues of this piece and how are they resolved? If the narrative structure is atypical, what is the common thread that brings the piece together?

Who is the author? When and where did they live when they wrote this? What events or facts about their context might have motivated them to write this piece? (These elements are useful to build opening sentences, for example.)

Does the piece express a specific message about the real world, a greater meaning, perhaps relating to a specific phenomenon the author was observing in the real world? (Note: This can be hard to decipher, especially in more contemporary pieces that follow a less traditional narrative structure and may not even have any identifiable message about reality. Reading online reviews of the piece and searching for quotes which were identified as important by other readers may help, as would asking about it to your classmates or teacher.)

You don’t have to answer all of these questions, especially considering that some of these may simply not apply to the specific work you are reading or may be too complex to answer by yourself. They are thinking tracks to help you deepen your understanding of what you are reading, not a checklist of questions to ask yourself before you get to your essay, so don’t sweat it if you can’t answer some of those questions.

2. understand your essay question / building your own essay question

a. understanding your essay question

Your goal here is to make sure you clearly understand what is asked of you. Here are a few steps to follow:

Identify what is asked of you. This will be either a standard question word like what, how or why or a direction verb at the imperative form telling you what to do. Here is a good breakdown of the most common action verbs used in essay questions. When in doubt, ask the teacher for clarification — they are the one who wrote the question, so they probably have a good idea of what kind of answer they expect.

Look at the terms used in the question. Is there any of those terms which has a hazy meaning to you or you don’t know at all what it means? Grab a dictionary and look it up. If it still feels imprecise, ask the teacher for more information.

Break the question down into parts. What are the literary devices mentioned in the question (characters, themes, narrative elements, stylistic quirks, etc.)? Can you spot them in the piece? If yes, mark pages with post-it tabs, so you can go back and analyze them later. Make sure you have all the necessary knowledge to interpret these devices by looking up literary theory on them if it’s not fresh in your memory. Mark down all the references you consult and note key points so you can come back to it later if needed.

Make a brainstorm of possible answers. This is not a mandatory step, but it can help guide you into choosing quotes to build your outline.

b. building your own essay question

This usually happens from time to time in college or university. It can feel a bit overwhelming to do this when you are not used to it. Most teachers will ask of you to have your essay question and/or outline approved before you move on to write your essay, or will gladly validate them for you, so don’t worry if you are not 100% sure of your direction. Here are some ideas to help you pick a subject to form a question about:

Is there something in the work which you did not understand the meaning of? Whether it is a style in the writing, a character’s motivations, a plot point or anything else, it may be a good base to work from. You don’t always have to work from something you know, your essay can be a great way to deepen your own knowledge of a piece.

Was there something that you found particularly moving in the book? If so, you could work on explaining through literary devices what makes this thing especially moving, objectively speaking.

Do you know of any other piece which explores the same themes as this one? If yes, you may be able to make a parallel between both works by comparing and contrasting how the authors chose to explore the same theme/subject (note: this is especially interesting to do with historical fiction and non-fiction or with authors of different times).

If nothing comes up, brainstorms are a good way to bring possible subjects on the table. Write everything you know about the work’s meaning, follow your intuition until you come up with a hypothesis that you are not 100% sure about but have a feeling could be true. You can try formulating a question after you have a hypothesis and ask the teacher for validation of both your thesis and your essay question.

Whatever you write down, don’t forget that your question needs to bring better insight into the meaning of the piece you are studying and it must force you to study literary devices, not just summarize elements of the book. Your proofs will be textual excerpts with figures of speech and choice of words which influence the signification of the text, and your question needs to reflect that.

3. pick up quotes that answer your question

Some teachers advise you to form your thesis statement and arguments before you pick up your quotes. Most other teachers have advised me to build arguments and my thesis statement from quotes. This process insures that you will not try to twist the quote to say what you want it to say, but you will interpret it as is and then draw conclusions from it — which is the logical procedure we use to build essays anyways, we observe the work, and then draw conclusions from it, right?

Right. So, take a piece of paper or open a word document and start picking out quotes which relate to your essay question, dividing them into categories of what you can interpret or see in them. If you use a sheet of paper, divide it in the number of paragraphs you have to write (if you are writing a multi-level essay, divide by the number of subtopics; if there are more than 6 subtopics, you may divide more broadly into topics). Make sure you pick up at least two quotes for each category, or twice the amount of subtopics if you are dividing into topics. You don’t want to have to anxiously shuffle through your book trying to find a plan B quote (if you realize your quote is not ideal in the end) and losing precious time if you are writing last minute. Finding two quotes which have roughly the same meaning is also a way to reduce the chances of misinterpretation.

Tip: Instead of rewriting the whole quotes, which can be time-consuming, you can write only the first few and last words and use colour-coded tabs in your book to help you find them back easily.

Don’t forget to mark down the page numbers! There’s nothing worse than finding a good quote but not being able to use it because you can’t find back where it was.

4. prepare your outline

Outlines are super important. This gives a general direction and conducting line to your essay. It also helps you make sure you don’t leave out any important points.

Now, for the specific structure of your outline and essay, I can’t give you many tips, because outline requirements vary depending on the teacher, schooling system, geographical region, language, etc. My way of building outlines won’t necessarily be the way your teacher wants you to use. However, I would make sure that your outline contains these specific elements:

Opening sentence(s): Depending on your structure, you may want to outline the basic subjects of each sentence that will be part of your introduction. Just a few keywords will be enough for a lot of people.

Thesis statement: This is a universal one. Make sure your thesis statement does not only describe events in the book, but describes a literary device or a reoccurring element and assigns it a signification.

Topic (and subtopic) sentences: Do not just jot down a few keywords, form complete sentences following the same model as your thesis statement. Remember that each of your subtopic sentences needs to prove your topic sentences, which need to prove your thesis statement.

Quotes: Include the pages of the quotes you have picked up in advance so you’re not stuck hunting back for them.

Explanation of quotes: Briefly summarize what the quote means in regards with your topic or subtopic sentence.

Conclusion: It may help to at least choose a subject for your closing sentences, so you’re not stuck when the time comes.

That is all for today! Find the second part about actual essay writing here, and don’t forget:

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lj-writes · 7 years

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@illiterallylondon The sheer length of our thread was verging on a health and safety violation, so if you don’t mind I’ll start a new one and make use of the cut tag. I will also attempt to categorize and summarize the issues, for any poor soul following along at home.

As I understand, the issues are as below:

1. Whether Finn could be interpreted to be a match for Kylo Ren according to your shipping pattern

2. Whether it is unfair to Kylux fans to argue that the popularity of Kylux is motivated in part by subconscious racism

3. Whether Hux is, in fact, more popular than Finn and Poe

4. Whether Hana Yori Dango proves the popularity of your stated shipping pattern unaffected by race

5. Whether you are a sea lion who leeches off others’ time and energy, then claims moral victory when others won’t give it to you

6. Miscellaneous

I will proceed in this numbered order, rearranging the points and statements as necessary.

1. Whether Finn could be interpreted to be a match for Kylo Ren according to your shipping pattern

So you insist, over and over again, that your interpretation of the characters is the only valid one and your interpretation of why Finn can’t be part of a megaship with Kylo Ren (or whomever) must hold true. You kept gerrymandering the hell out of your so-called shipping pattern, saying the characters can’t be moral opposites, can’t want to kill each other etc.

Except you admit that shipping patterns are malleable and not that rigid and furthermore don’t hold across fandoms, see Point 2 below:

2. Whether it is unfair to Kylux fans to argue that the popularity of Kylux is motivated in part by subconscious racism

“Yet you imply that Kylux is only popular due to racism by saying that if the shipping pattern was a major factor in the pairing’s popularity then Finnlo would be a ship, thus people only like Kylux because they like white people. Which, yes, is saying that race overrides characterization.”

You are completely misunderstanding what I was trying to do there. What I’m getting at is that your “shipping pattern” is bunk. You acknowledged yourself that this is malleable and based on fandom thinking by saying in regards to the shipping pattern applying to Drarry (emphasis added), “regardless of how in-character that may be.”

Also you contradicted yourself when you said near the end of your post:

‘I said in my original paragraph that your argument is that fans of Kylux are moved “primarily” by racism. And did not mention it being the “only factor” anywhere. At. All.’

You... literally said “[I] imply that Kylux is only popular due to racism.” So you did, indeed paint my argument as race being the only factor of Kylux’s popularity? LOL.

To address your constant assertion that I’m saying I’m saying Kylux is only popular due to racism (with ridiculous claims that characters of color should have no fans at all if this were true), let me try to explain it this way:

Let’s say a show has two characters, A and B, and ten fans. There are a number of reasons why any given fan might like A or B. It could be characterization, gender, their plot, background, all these are factors to different degrees. If race is a factor, it would--together with other factors--weight preference one way or the other. So if A is white and B is Black, seven fans might like A while three like B. If A is Black and B is white, four fans might like A while six fans like B. Under this scenario there are three fans who would have liked B better regardless of race, but for the fandom as a whole race still played a role in who was more popular. It doesn’t have to be a primary or exclusive factor, as you kept trying to paint as my argument, it can still be a decisive factor without being either.

That’s all I was saying from the start, that race affects fandom preferences as a whole. I’m not talking about individuals, but in the aggregate there are discernible patterns which you have acknowledged. If you agree, as you claim, that race can affect fandom preferences and is a factor, then we’re in agreement. There’s nothing to discuss and you caused us both to waste a whole lot of time and words over nothing. Happy?

“…Again, I’m forced to repeat myself, but Kylux shippers are people. Calling out racism in fandom is calling out the shippers who participate in said fandom. Unless you’re saying that shippers aren’t people.”

I “called them out” as being affected by subconscious racism. The exiestence of which you acknowledged. The only sense in which I called anyone racist (words that you put in my mouth, by the way) is in the sense that they are affected by racism in their fannish preferences, which is a systematic issue and not a matter of personal morality. The only sense in which you could possibly feel judged by this assertion is by making these systematic issues about yourself, which is exactly what you are doing.

Put another way, if you think subconscious racism in fandom exists but it’s unfair to say fandom racism has any meaningful effects (because they affect people, obviously, and that according to you is calling them racist), what would be a good way to talk about fandom racism? Is there a way to talk about fandom racism that you think doesn’t call people out or judge them for being racist?

Also notice the giant dose of hypocrisy in this:

“Thanks, again not a part of some of these fandoms but I’m taking your word for it [that conflicting explanations are given for CoCs’ comparative lack of popularity].”

So like, you think it’s sooooo unfair for me to supposedly call Kylux shippers racist, but it’s okay to call Rick/Darryl shippers or Steve/Bucky shippers racist? Because I’m actually applying the exact same logic to all these ships, that their popularity, and the lack of popularity of characters of color ships, are driven in large part by subconscious racism. Yet you’ll take my word for it when it comes to fandoms you don’t know. Why do you think it’s okay to call a bunch of people you don’t know racist?

Also, if you think this:

“Not personally a part of the MCU fandom (I tend to strongly dislike superhero movies) so I can’t speak to this point.“

is the same thing as this:

“I’m taking your word for it and accepting that as someone who is a part of the fandom”

...then you really need to update your communication skills. Like seriously.

3. Whether Hux is, in fact, more popular than Finn and Poe

“Hux does not surpass the hero in popularity in the majority of fandom, just as Boba Fett and Tarkin and TR-8R do not. However in more niche communities (Kylux AO3 fandom, Boba Fett/Tarkin fansites and certain SW fansites) they surpass the heroes in popularity.“

This is an unwarranted change of subject. From the very first post I was talking about what one might call “deep” fandom--the part of fandom that writes fanfics and ships characters. This is by no means the majority of the moviegoing audience, so your trying to shift the discussion to the larger casual fandom is a derailment.

4. Whether Hana Yori Dango proves the popularity of your stated shipping pattern unaffected by race (+ Buffy fandom)

“So let me get this straight: you previously argue that people of color can be racist (which I agree with btw), then go on to imply that the fans of BOF are Asian-American therefore racism likely isn’t a factor…?“

That is not what I argued at all, please read again. What I said was, emphasis added:

“Actually race still does affect fans [then going on to cite the disproportionalely Asian-American viewership of K-Dramas]“

This was in response to your statement that “I explicitly cited HYD as an example for race not affecting fans of a series.”

So like... I’m not sure how you got from here to there, but maybe calm down and stop jumping to conclusions?

Also, the part where I said “Also telling fans that they have nothing to complain about because Finn and Poe still have followings” was in response to this part:

“Kylo and Hux are more popular. It doesn’t mean Finn and Poe are unpopular within the AO3/Tumblr fandom at all. There’s nothing lacking in their characters, they just don’t fit the mold.“

Since my entire OP was about comparative popularity, not about Finn and Poe having some sort of following, this misses the point and comes across as disingenuous. Also, as discussed above, your whole “mold” argument is bunk.

“Buffy is more popular than Spike but Kylo is also more popular than Hux.”

Um... false comparison because Kylo’s not the hero, in case you haven’t noticed.

“My point in HYD is that. Again. The ship is non-white and falls into the shipping pattern, and is popular. Indicating that race didn’t bother HYD fans,”

Okay, so you’re moving the goalposts again and again here. I specifically talked about popularity comparisons between characters of different races in the same show, but you’re trying to drag the discussion to a monoracial show. Also, as I have said and you have accepted, this same shipping pattern does not hold in multiracial shows such as the MCU and The Walking Dead.

Besides, as I have already said, race (race, not racism), does in fact affect the viewership of K-Dramas. So in addition to being a derail your basic premise fails.

“The American version would’ve been much more popular if all people cared about was race and not characters that fall into a pattern of interest.”

I. Never. Said. All. People. Cared. About. Was. Race. Stop putting fucking words in my mouth, and if you want to rehash this point again please read my “A and B” example above. Carefully. Also you contradicted yourself yet again when you claimed you never claimed that I said race was the only factor.

I specifically made intra-show comparisons between characters in the same show because there are too many factors that affect the comparative popularity between shows. The American version of HYD failed because it sucked. I never said a show’s quality doesn’t matter and that race overcomes all other factors. Again, stop derailing and stop putting words in my mouth.

I already addressed your point about the YouTube video. Don’t try to waste my time more than you already have.

“To start with, I didn’t say that younger girls don’t write fic, just that most HYD fans who are teens (especially having a shitload of content for their OTP) aren’t as likely to produce content for said OTP. Which makes sense seeing as there is a disproportionate amount of fans vs the amount of fics in the HYD FFN archive.”

How do you know it’s disproportionate? This goes back to my point about casual fandom and deep fandom. Deep fandom is only a tiny, tiny drop in the sea of casual fandom. Only a small portion of HYD fans will write fic, but the same is true of any show. So your attempt to extrapolate some vast hidden fan base for HYD out of proportion to the number of fanfics doesn’t work, really. Especially since the original topic in the first place is deep fandom, not casual fandom, so chalk this up as yet another derail.

Also your points about K-drama and FanFiction.Net demographics are either hilariously deceptive or hilariously ignorant, I can’t decide which?

“Because compared to the other numbers in that study the 16-20 group made up the majority of K-Drama viewers.“

That’s... that’s not what a majority means. A little over one-third of K-Drama viewers are in the 16-20 group, which contradicts your assertion that “most of the HYD fans are teenaged girls.”

“Also in pointing out that FFN tends to have younger writers kind of confirmed my argument that searching for HYD fic in AO3 would be taking an inaccurate sampling since most teen writers use FFN.”

Um, “most FFN writers are teens” is not the same thing as “most teen writers use FFN.” Just pointing that out.

“The people who wrote fic for HYD were bound to post it on FFN, but most of the HYD fandom really couldn’t be bothered to write fic for it. Otherwise we’d have much more than 1k fics in the FFN archive right now.“

What... you’re not even making sense anymore... do you notice the circular reasoning? You’re starting with an assumption (FFN underrepresents HYD’s popularity) that is also the conclusion (HYD is a lot bigger than the number of FFN fics would indicate). Holy shit, this is such a mess. It’s like a car accident I can’t look away from.

“I gave you evidence which you responded to once and never mentioned again. How do you explain the millions of views on videos like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVxQ_g2NL6g) otherwise? If we’re taking the amount of fic to equate to the amount of fans (about 1k) then where are these millions of English-speaking people coming from?”

As I said above, only a small proportion of fans of any work actually write fanfic for it (”deep fandom”). This is true of HYD but it’s also true of any fandom. You have failed to show, except with your hilarious circular argument above, that the number of HYD fics is disproportionately small in proportion to its actual fan base. Of course the number of fics is smaller than the number of fans, because it always is.

5. Whether you are a sealion who leeches off others’ time and energy, then claims moral victory when others won’t give it to you

“I literally said that if antis really cared about their cause that much they’d be ‘more open’ to conversation. Not ‘they’d be open to spending enormous amounts of time’ debating with me.”

This is disingenuous, coming from someone who makes it impossible to carry on a conversation that doesn’t take enormous amounts of time and energy. For instance, my OP was 175 words long. Your reply was more than twice as long at 448 words, and you derailed and deflected and changed the subject and strawmanned in every single post until the thread grew into a monstrosity that I’m afraid to even do a word count for, mostly because I’d hate myself for how much time I wasted with you. I mean, I’ve already spent four hours after finishing a major project replying to your ridiculous points.

“If you think productive activism is screaming at someone who wants to talk then blocking them off without letting them speak, I’m sorry, but you’re not being productive.”

What I’m doing isn’t productive, either, talking to someone who debates either as dishonestly or badly (I don’t even know which, I think it’s the former driving the latter) as you. This is not being open to conversation.

“I have been very open to discussion and have actually had my opinions completely changed and renewed…I’d consider myself at least relatively open-minded, yeah.”

Open to discussion... by constantly putting words in my mouth. (And not even keeping your story safe on which words you’re putting, lmao.)

Open to discussion... by making a discussion that I made clear was not about you, about you.

Open to discussion... by constantly changing the subject.

Open to discussion... by using terrible math and terrible logic.

Sure, Jan.

“What am I doing now? Ignoring all your comments and not reading them?“

The part about “educating yourself” completely flew over your head, right? To be clear, “educating yourself” does not mean “demand that others educate you.” The subject of the verb “educate” is different in these two clauses, just so you know.

“So I’m meant to listen to the ‘grievances of fans of color’ but also shouldn’t ask fans of color to spend time talking to me. Gotcha.”

Are you really this amazingly literal-minded or are you being purposefully obtuse? Googling “fandom racism” is a thing? Reading the many, many articles by fans of color about fandom trends and fandom experiences is also a thing?

Going on to people’s posts and shoving your unwanted, stale opinions on them is not listening. Opening with “actually, this is why you’re wrong (and also how dare you call me racist)” is not listening.

“If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with pretending to be an activist so you can jump on a bandwagon of sending people hateful messages, then I really don’t know what to say.“

All it takes is searching “harassment” on my blog to learn where I stand on that sort of thing, but nice try painting me as something I’m not. :)

“So if I really was a sealion, I would have demanded that you respond to me in what was meant to be my final response by calling you a coward or something“

Did you read the meme originator comic? Being a sea lion isn’t limited to calling people cowards, it’s about implying that those who don’t respond are unable to defend their points or are in some way lacking--which is exactly what you did by saying antis would be more open to a conversation with you if they “truly wanted to change the situation, or help.” I.e. by not answering your points, they’re not being open to conversation, hence not changing or helping anything. People who didn’t want to talk to you (not talking about harassment, just quitting out of frustration) didn’t bother because, again, it’s nothing we haven’t heard before and you've shown yourself to be a dishonest debater. Also because they know when to quit, unlike me.

“If I really was after validation or whatever, I’d be using tags. You know, so like-minded Kylux shippers could find my argument and agree with me.”

Goalpost moving, after you’ve had it explained to you very clearly what claiming moral victory is. Not that I expect any better from you at this point.

6. Miscellaneous

“Also, Star Wars isn’t groundbreaking storytelling? Are you kidding me?”

So again we run into the problem of using words in different senses. What I meant is that there’s nothing terribly new about the characters or storytelling, directly in response to your assertion that Finn and Poe don’t fit “the mold.” You seem to have taken it in the sense that it’s not popular or good, which... isn’t the meaning of groundbreaking? But I see now that you mean the mold as in the mold of AO3 shipping, so whatever.

“Hilariously enough I actually disagree with the Hux fans (which you probably assumed I’d side with), although I do think TFO’s attack on Hosnian Prime is pretty comparable to America bombing Hiroshima.”

I didn’t assume, I only showed what I sometimes do on this blog. Thanks for assuming what I assumed, though? And no, it’s not comparable. Like, I believe the bombing of Hiroshima was a war crime, but it was not the deliberate extermination of an entire population without warning or declaration of war. Monstrous as Hiroshima was, Hosnian Prime is incomparably more monstrous.

#hooooooly shit #wtf am i doing #this rabbit hole goes deep indeed #it's a hilarious ride though #fandom racism #troll in the dungeon #illiterallylondon

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