#i've had this in my drafts since last night so i figured i ought to post or delete it

[thezolblade]

Anon from the fic! Wow!!!!!!!!! That outline!!!!!! Do you want to share any more hints about those three branches?

Sure! (This is partly making up more details as I go along, which means making progress with the draft.) Below the cut for spoilers:

So I've got three routes following after Reckoning now - see also that last ask. After Jon attacks Tim and scares Martin into cooperating again:

Retaliation. Sasha and Tim burn down the Institute (with Leitner's help). Jon's hurt by the archive's destruction, but he survives, at the others' mercy.

Relocation. Martin talks Jon into asking Elias to transfer them both to one of the Institute's sister organizations, citing irreconcilable differences with the rest of the team. (They know at that point that they're also temples to Beholding, and hope they'll be granted this even if they can't quit.) Since this is roughly at the point in the timeline when Jonah wanted to put some distance between himself and Jon to avoid being compelled (iirc he mentioned that he'd have gone on a trip if he hadn't been arrested), he ends up sending them to open a second branch of the Magnus Institute in Edinburgh, close to its original site.

Respectable fears. Jon takes the Institute from Jonah, and carries on maintaining the Archives while running the whole organisation. He keeps Martin as his personal assistant, and gets more calculated in manipulating him without breaking him, fending off numb depression by asking him to research enemies that they can fight to save lives, and making the rules more structured in private. Meanwhile, he sends Tim to investigate the Unknowing, and tries to decide whether he'll be too dangerous to keep hold of long term. When Sasha's ready to give up on changing things, he offers her a consultancy role, so that she can stay on his payroll, but spend her time on projects at other organizations, and she takes that as the best deal she can get.

Hints about the other routes, hmm...

Reconciliation: The first night, when Jon realizes he may have fucked up beyond anything that Martin will put up with for long, his first reaction, instead of figuring out some brilliant way of handling that, is to retreat to his room for a cigarette. Martin waits on the sofa, wishing he hadn't admitted that he doesn't like being shouted at or shoved around, because now he's getting the silent treatment, and it's only a matter of time before he's kicked out... Until he hears Jon light a second cigarette, and realizes he ought to go talk to him, or he might just hide and chain smoke all night.

Subjugation: Here's a bit of dialogue from the first night. A lot of conversations go a slightly different direction in my drafts than in the initial notes, and sometimes unused lines come up again later, so this level of detail is the most subject to change, but it might be an interesting read anyway:

Martin could feel himself blushing hard enough that the tips of his ears were burning. "If I'd ever imagined that we had a chance, I wouldn't have wanted our first time to go this way. It's late, and we were both tired and upset going into this, a-and I'm glad I've cheered you up, but I guess it doesn't feel like we're going about things the right way to make it last, or make it special."

"What would you like to do, to make it special?" Jon's tone was light and faintly mocking.

Martin took a second to collect his thoughts, treating it as a serious question. It wasn't as if he stood to lose anything by making a few suggestions.

"Why don't we get ourselves hot drinks, and cuddle on the sofa until we're ready to fall asleep? Then maybe tomorrow, we could talk about our likes and dislikes. You know, books, music, TV, food, all that sort of thing, a-as well as sex. How does that sound?" Martin tried to smile as he waited for an answer. The silence stretched on, and he couldn't help but get psyched out. "Uh, shall I go make us some tea?"

"Not yet."

"Oh?"

"Take off your clothes. I haven't even seen you yet."

Martin hesitated, but Jon looked quite intent on doing this now.

"Oh, okay." Martin clenched his fingers in his t-shirt, then glanced at the bags he'd left next to the bed. "If we're going to be up for a while longer, why don't I grab my phone and put some music on? That could be, ah, relaxing."

"I don't need mood music. I need to know what you're capable of."

"...Oh." Martin heard his own voice go quiet, and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to pull himself together. Jon was making it fairly clear that he didn't care about setting him at ease, and he still wasn't in the mood to take no for an answer. Hadn't he better play along before he lashed out again?

#heart of the disaster #tma thoughts #rozzlynn's fanfic

[coldrubies]

Grief cinema

My mom died at the end of 2019, right before lockdown. When covid hit, I was still in a foggy state. My reaction to everything delayed. I am supposed to stay home? Not go outside? Fine! Those were precisely what my plans were for the next mumblemumble years anyway.

My brightest, most vivid memories would have been of the movies that I saw anyway, because movies are special to me and I am always watching them. But the way they informed my grieving process surprised me. One does not necessarily expect, in the moment, for anything to really make it better.

But the day of my mom's death—maybe the day of, maybe the last day that I saw my mom—I watched MIDSOMMAR for the first time. I didn't know the plot and was a little concerned about it but a lot unable to do anything about the way that I felt; the DVD was already in the DVD player, and I knew my mother was dying/dead. Florence Pugh's portrayal of grief was a real gift. I felt held by it. It was miraculous to me, frankly, how much it lifted me into a state of feeling able to engage with what was going on and how I was feeling. There is a rant in me—and it is in there pretty shallow; you can get at it easily—about how acting is a vital service. I feel about actors the way that THE OFFICE's Dwight Schrute feels about his urologist. It is something I cannot do myself all the time, validate my own feelings about life; I need someone to do it for me, and I am grateful.

Also right around the same proximity to my mom's death, I saw the "Original Cast Album: Co-op" episode of DOCUMENTARY NOW! in the midst of watching that season. It was funny, I loved it, it took me out of my troubles, and the milieu was so novel and fascinating to me—this is how a cast recording (something I had never thought about) is/was made?—that I looked up which real documentary the episode was based on.

Before addressing ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY and all it's done for me, a word on Stephen Sondheim:

I will pick up practically any biography of an artist. An all-time choice was the biography of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon. I didn't know her or her work, and it was such an absorbing book, I think about returning to it all the time. Ditto Michael Schulman's Meryl Streep biography. I love to get a feeling of people in time. The choice to buy Stephen Sondheim's biography was not totally random, but it happened to be on my person when, immediately after my mother's death, I was hit by a car! It wasn't fatal—here I am—it just tipped me over. But I was in a fragile state, I did cry a lot, and I explained to the driver that my mother had just died, and that was why I was crying, and that would be the only reason I cry about anything for a while, regardless of what it seemed like I ought to be crying about. Eventually, I got to a hospital that night to make sure nothing had happened to me, and I was stranded in a room for more than an hour, and all I had was this book about Stephen Sondheim.

I can't remember—I'm sure I could figure it out—whether I had the book before I saw the documentary, whether I'd already seen it by the time I started reading it—but it all feels like it happened more or less at once that I went from not knowing* who Stephen Sondheim was to knowing, you know, the reams of tedious details that a fan knows (how many lines he preferred to have on his yellow legal pads; his go-to chord structure).

As all of this is going on, I've been writing a novel about musicians since 2018, and I made a promise to myself that, once I finished the first draft, I would prioritize learning about music. I never did when I was in school, I always wanted to, and the novel would never be done if I did not understand what my characters are supposed to be doing. I finished the first draft at the very end of 2019, and how fortuitous for this guide to show up, again, more or less all at once (just in time for me to be truly knocked out when he died two years later, more or less exactly from the time of all of this).

The extent to which I've clung to that gift as a life raft during this time is best demonstrated by the fact that, at the end of 2019, I had no knowledge of anything pertaining to music other than liking it, and now I have been composing music since the spring of 2022 (composing was the very long goal, and I still can't get over the fact that I met it). Have I neglected other parts of my life? Big time. But this is still impressive to me considering I would have liked very much to simply pull a blanket over myself and be sad quite ongoingly.

(*- On the subject of "not knowing who Stephen Sondheim was," my only frame of reference was seeing his name in the credits, mostly on item descriptions online, for, like, CDs of the WEST SIDE STORY, INTO THE WOODS, and ASSASSINS cast recordings, all of which I happened to see randomly over the years, but it is the kind of coincidence that would leave one who doesn't know anything about musical theatre to wonder if, maybe, Stephen Sondheim has written every single musical ever.)

Back to the documentary:

Between my discovery of ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY and now, the Criterion Collection has issued an edition of it on DVD and Blu-ray that is beautiful, a dream come true, and it features the DOCUMENTARY NOW! parody episode—magnificent. At the end of 2019, though, my only option for owning it was as a Quicktime file. This is fine—whether or not I have internet access, I have access to ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY.

I have so much to express about ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY, but I will restrict myself only to how it has intermingled with my grieving process. It is, of course, a pleasure to see people lost in work that is demanding but, compared to grieving a loved one's death, a load of cake. In the moment, the first many times I saw it, it came with a fresh, invigorating spray of curiosity-provocation. I love to be curious. Curiosity can do a lot for me. And there is a lot to be curious about for the completely uninitiated when it comes to the byzantine, idiosyncratic, union-forged business practices of Broadway theatre. Knowing how much he loved rules, watching him in this documentary, I am so moved and so happy for Stephen Sondheim that he was from and dwelled in a land that loved rules so much.

I could go on and on and on about how cathartic it is to watch someone be difficult, a ruthless artist, rigid, upholding a high standard as a method of care. I could introduce the subject of Stephen Sondheim and mother issues and we would be here all day. One of the conditions of my loving a thing is that I just go on about it. But when I first saw ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY right around the time that my mother died, the big thing that it did for me was show me, in case I felt like allowing my grief to interfere with my plans, that working on music was going to be good, nice, and right, which in this case were all the same thing.

It's been comforting to rewatch MIDSOMMAR since the end of 2019 and, to be honest with you, I rewatch ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM: COMPANY on a basis so routine that, on second thought, to be honest with you about it would embarrass me too greatly, but the other movie that did something for me in the bewildering swirl that was right-around-the-time-my-mother died, maybe the day it happened, isn't one I revisit, but it is worth noting. I was not going to prepare any food that day, which I barely incentivize myself to do when I'm not pulverized by the cruelty of fate, so I bought, I think, a poké bowl (spicy tuna, etc.) and a Mediterranean-style grain bowl (ancient grains, spicy feta cheese, etc.), and ate them both promptly and simultaneously. I felt sick. I could not do anything lest I risk throwing up. I watched SPACE JAM (I did not throw up! A small miracle).

I am I-saw-SPACE-JAM-in-the-theatre-and-it-was-age-appropriate years old. The soundtrack was a presence in my home. I have no tender feelings about it, but, watching it for the first time as an adult, its ludicrousness did completely take me out of what was happening to my soul and body. That's not nothing!

Maybe more happened then and it isn't coming to me now, but this is how I remember it.

#stephen sondheim #original cast album company #midsommar #space jam #joe pytka #da pennebaker #ari aster #grief #covid

[coldtomyflash]

Because I fucking hate Earth X

Since the CW verse is all about their alternate worlds and evil version of characters ... 

What about an alternate Earth X that wasn’t about literal Nazism but was still a dystopia - a violent one with all the bad hallmarks and brutality and hatred that all fascism engenders?

What if there was a regime that didn’t come out of WW2 or the Nazis or even Germany - what if it came out of America? Or America and Britain together? What if the shows actually had a half-decent political message to deliver about police states and surveillance states and runaway hatred and fear in society and how that can spiral fast? 

I’m not talking Star City 2046 or even a future where companies/conglomerates are now nations, I’m really talking about a message about where our world is actually is / is headed in terms of politics and xenophobia and global crises, but dialed up and stylized. 

And what if our heroes weren’t literal fucking Nazis but were still the good guys? What the the story’s message was one of “our heroes are good people because they grew up on Earth 1″ but “our heroes are good people because in any universe, they will learn and fight and claw their way toward what is right”?

Because to me, it’s infinitely more interesting to explore the plight of a good person in a world where evil is the norm than to say “here’s an evil version of this character” with no real motivation? This isn’t Savitar or Red-Kara or League-Oliver who are distorted, drugged, or desperate. On top of being antisemitic garbage, it’s also dull and trite and shock-value-esque. Even Doomworld (which I found pretty lackluster) afforded more respect to its heroes.

I mean hell, this isn’t even the animated Flashpoint elseworld with evil Wonder Woman because at least evil Wonder Woman had her own agency? The current Earth X “heroes as villains” are just cogs in a war machine. And if the story you want to tell is “your beloved heroes are just obedient drones” then you’ve really got to prepared for that story and what it means, and I’m certain the DC CWTV writers...aren’t.

So, an elseworld dictatorship that grows out of the political West, particularly America, with our heroes as jaded freedom fighters in a world full of that violence and oppression? In a world where war is on the home front, is the home front, and it’s violence-as-resistance rather than war on an international ‘battlefields’ sort of way?

And with this setting, if you want to keep some of the Earth 1 heroes as being on the Evil Side on that earth then fine, okay, it becomes less atrocious if you change up the worldbuilding elements, but at least make it fit that character? Like Barry and Oliver have both canonically resisted forms of indoctrination (if you’re confused about how Barry has, consider that for 15 years, ever since he was a literal child, people have been gaslighting him about his mother’s death and it’s frankly bizarre from a psychological standpoint that he still believed in his father’s innocence given the repeated and consistent messages sent his way from trusted people like police and therapists and his foster parent that would make him doubt his worldview). These are people with incredibly strong cores of right and wrong and truth and lies, at least as we know them? So saying they’d sign up with the Evil Regime is hard to make sense of, and you’d have to do a lot of storytelling to make me understand and accept it. 

Anyway, what if the crossover focused on the dynamics of the Earth 1 heroes seeing alternative versions of themselves as jaded, tired fighters, and the startling clash and interpersonal dynamics? Of course they have some major battles to fight etc, but what if the message the shows explored was how ‘what it means to be good’ isn’t so cut and dry. A message that directly puts hope and the approach that says “violence is always wrong” against an approach that says “this is the only means we have to survive” and highlights how that moderate thinking fails in the face of truly evil intent. 

“You’re killing people!” Barry shouts at the mirror image of himself, staring in horror at his blood soaked arms.

“Don’t you understand yet -- if I don’t kill them, they kill us! Parents, children, infants!”

He recoils from his doppelganger, feeling sick. “You can reason with --”

“We tried that! I tried that! You think I want to kill? If I try to reason with one of them, they live to kill ten of us!”

“That doesn’t meant you have to...”

“What else can I do?” He’s scathing now. “We spent years letting them bowl over our protests and watching the news tell us not to fight violence with violence. We spent years sitting in our homes watching them gain more power because they were willing to do anything to take and we didn’t want to fight dirty like they do. I spent years not killing them, even after the fighting started. Years of watching them get back up and kill my friends, Barry. The only way to fight an enemy that would rather see everyone you love dead is to stop that enemy before it ever gets the chance to hurt them.”

He thinks about Eobard, about Zoom. About Savitar. He can’t pretend that’s not who he sees when he looks at his doppleganger, but he also can’t pretend he doesn’t understand. He does. And yet...

“This isn’t --” he looks at the carnage surrounding them. “This isn’t the way.”

“This is just survival.”

Or what about them seeing their counterparts fighting the good fight, and instead of righteous judgement (instead of what their counterparts might even be expecting from them), they receive compassion instead? 

What if the Earth-X heroes flinch expecting a lecture, a blow, because they remember how they used to be, and instead get a hard, tight hug, and a whispered ‘thank you’ from the Earth 1 heroes, the ones who understand? 

What if we saw Felicity and Oliver take in the sight of Oliver-X, another freedom fighter, after being steeped in blood, and Ollie is cringing. He doesn’t want Felicity to see any version of him killing so freely, not now, not when murder is in his past. So imagine his surprise when she goes up to his Earth-X counterpart and hugs him, and thanks him?

Because she knows, she understands. She’s Jewish and she knows her history, and fighting fascists is a different world than killing henchmen of drug runners on rooftops. This is war, for freedom and survival, even if it doesn’t look like war in the typical sense. No tanks, no bombs. Just surveillance and paramilitary and neighbors snitching on neighbors and people hiding and going underground to survive.

Wouldn’t that be a better story than ‘Oliver and Barry are literal Nazis on Earth X and somehow Felicity has to live with that knowledge now’?

Anyway, obviously the CW is never going to give us anything half so raw as that, nor so radically left as to say we should fight intolerance with extreme measures (but uh, we should. not murder but like, punching a Nazi is the morally right move, even if it’s not the legally right one). 

But this is what I mean when I say that writing mirrorverses full of Nazis and making heroes fascists isn’t just morally apprehensible and wrong but also fucking lazy? It doesn’t think about the characters and their motives and doesn’t take the effort to consider the message it invokes for its viewer. Writing an evil version of a hero should be a character study or should provide some insight into the person or into human nature. It should carry a message. Savitar carries one (even if I have some issues with it), as did Red-Kara. What will we learn from Earth-X? My guess is... very little. 

So instead of giving us insight, it’s making characters evil as an easy out for forcing a conflict and driving up the emotional stakes without really giving us a reason to care. It’s shock-value writing with no meat to it. It’s shallow and reeks of a sense of hopelessness. It promotes this idea that we’re all drones who will obey because we’re told to. 

And I’m not here to knock the very real power of indoctrination, but the real world doesn’t work like that. People tend to know when what they’re doing is wrong, that oppression is wrong, and if they’re genuinely ignorant to it, then learning tends to open their eyes. And after that it’s up to choice - they choose to throw their head in the sand and continue being evil, or they choose to do better. And literally all of the heroes we’ve been introduced to in the DC CWTV universe choose better. So...?

The story is weak, and the message is... insidious. Do better, DC CWTV. If I can come up with a better elseworld in an hour, you have no excuse.

#anyway i hate #the crossover clusterfuck #crossover episodes #crossover spoilers #gotta go for lunch now #and then do something OTHER than be angry about this mess #i think i'm done talking about it for good now #i've had this in my drafts since last night so i figured i ought to post or delete it #anyway #antisemitism tw #nazism tw #nazis tw #elseworlds #long post #long post for ts #hence the cut

[pipermca]

Writing Year in Review - 2021

Look, 2021, you had one job. Your one job was not to suck. And although you started to really shape up in the fall, you completely fumbled it at the end. Way to go.

Ugh. Seriously.

On the personal and writing front, it was a bit of a mixed bag. Our summer weather sucked, and that seriously affected my mental health. I don't do well in heat, and the heat waves were terrible. Then when the heat abated a bit, the air outside was filled with smoke from fires, so I couldn't even enjoy being outside. Living in a place where we basically only get three or four months of comfortable outdoor weather, I desperately needed to be outside... And that couldn't happen.

On the other hand, I did manage to finish Mind, Body, and Soul – by far the longest story I've ever written. I've mentioned that I think that story really ought to have been split into three "books": pre-war, war-time up until the Autobots leave Cybertron, and then landing on Earth to the end of the story. (Each one would have been about 100,000 words.) Those are the three main arcs of the story, but when I was writing they gelled so well as cohesive bits (and my brain was thinking of it as one long, continuous story) it didn't even occur to me to separate them into individual stories.

Ah well. It's just a big epic, I guess. One of my "to dos" is to explain the original plan for the story, which was much shorter but had a much more melancholy ending. After getting to know Barricade and Prowl and Bluestreak better, I decided I wanted to do better by them, and completely rethought the plot.

I finished posting Mind, Body, and Soul in March, and followed that up with a few "extras" stories to cap off the series. Then I let my muse work on other things that amused it and... overall, I think I had a pretty productive writing year! It wasn't quite as productive as 2020 (mostly because I took my foot off the gas after finishing MBS) but in some ways it was more fruitful.

In 2021 I posted 15 works to AO3, which includes the last 9 chapters of MBS. (That total also includes one short fic I wrote years ago that I transferred from Tumblr to AO3). In total I posted 123,108 words to AO3 across those 15 works. I also wrote 107,222 words, but that includes zine pieces that are not yet available, and my IDW2 reviews that I've been posting.

I'm content with those numbers. Previously I was setting a goal of about 10,000 words per month, but considering how atrocious this year's been I think I did pretty good. Interestingly, when I look at my writing tracker, there wasn't a big dip in productivity over the summer like I was expecting. You can tell that I basically went "whew, bleah!" and basically stopped writing for a few weeks after finishing the draft of MBS in early February. XD

My average words per hour is pretty consistent, especially when I set aside an hour or so to write, sometimes doing sprints. With the exception of September (hmm, no idea what happened there!) I averaged around 600-700 words per hour.

I think this is the graph that irritates me the most though. XD It's obvious that I get most of my writing done in the evening, since that's when I've got the time to write. But I know that I'm actually at my most productive in mid-morning... while I'm at work. Argh.

In December 2021 I wrote 8,113 words. I've got a new WIP I'm working on that is very intriguing to my muse, although it's slow going because I'm having to figure out new lore and new relationships on the fly. I can't wait to share that with people.

As for the goals I set for myself for 2021, I actually did pretty well, better than I thought I did!

Finish Mind, Body, and Soul YES! I DID IT!

Finish Must Like Cats and One More Night I got one of these done, finally. 50% isn't bad.

Start on The King and the Bounty Hunter Yes! I've got two chapters drafted and I've been doodling around with the third.

Start the sequel to Peer Review Nope

Apply for two zines Yes! And got in! And pieces are completed! And one of them is for sale now!

Write two comic scripts for practice Nope

So, my goals for 2022, in order of priority:

Finish Must Like Cats

Finish Sun and Moon (working title)

Apply for two zines (if something catches my eye)

Write two comic scripts for practice

Finish The King and the Bounty Hunter

Start By Fire and Flame (working title)

I am quite pleased at the number of stories I've finished, too. Like last year, behind the cut is the first sentence of each of my stories I posted, and the month is it was posted in.

January: Mind, Body, and Soul. (The first chapter posted in 2021 was chapter 64.) While the Autobots struggled to recover from their losses, the Decepticons wasted no time in pressing their advantage.

March: Knell. Barricade's spark thudded against its casing with every frantic spin.

March: War's End. Prowl scanned the dusty horizon, searching for any sign of the shuttles that he knew were inbound.

March: They Grow Up So Fast. Bluestreak stretched as he made his way down the hallway from his room, lifting his arms over his helm and extending his wings until the cables sang with tension.

April: Turn, Turn, Turn. Smokescreen was so focused on trying to get the tiny crystal cleaving to sit just right in the growth medium that he didn't hear the door to the flat open and close.

June. In Your Dreams. Hound woke from recharge to the sensation of falling through the air.

June: What Happens on a Mission... As the smoke in the cutter's cockpit cleared, Smokescreen scanned the control board in front of him.

July: Core Override. Prowl hated prison transfer detail.

September: One More Night. There was so much to do.

October: Going Against Tradition. "Chosen Wind Walker Thundercracker, the Emperor will see you now."

October: Just the Three of Us. To anyone casually walking by, the scene wouldn't have looked too odd: just a man enjoying the sun and the sand, kicked back on the hood of his sports car and listening to some tunes.

October: Claim Rejected. “While I appreciate all of your efforts to keep me safe,” Optimus Prime said, glaring – glaring!– around the meeting room at his command staff, “I cannot condone sending other Autobots in to fight Megatron for me.”

November: Debts. Just like usual, Smokescreen was waiting for Prowl outside of their usual diner.

November: A Gift from Morpheus. The crack of the rifle seemed to stop Smokescreen's spark.

December: Deck the Halls. Hound had not been prepared for what greeted him when he got home from the office on Saturday evening.

And that's a wrap! I hope everyone has a very safe, calm, and uneventful 2022. (Key point: uneventful, as in not exciting, as in completely precedented.)

#progress report #year in review #on writing